by Max Candee
Unable to put my feelings into words, I let Anna Sophia see another memory, just a hint of her mother’s soul. It was whiter than a fresh snowfall at noon, achingly, entirely white. Looking at it almost hurt my eyes, but I couldn’t turn away. It was as if the sun had risen and I could hardly remember what the candle flame looked like. I couldn’t believe she was Yoga’s daughter. How could anything so perfectly pure be linked to that hag’s soul? How could anything so dark have molded this blazing whiteness? It was as if Yoga had set out to build a snow maiden and somehow the pitch of her hands had not stuck to the snow.
“All the cobwebs of my mind were blown away,” I say. “I was still sick, but I knew what Yoga had done. And I knew that I could trust Seredushka. There was no guile, no deceit in her soul. I doubt she could even have understood the concept. She nursed me with all the skill she had. She talked as she did so, and as my strength returned, I replied. We talked about everything and nothing. She made me smile. This was what Yoga had wanted me to believe she was. This was the mask she had worn to gain my trust. But with Sereda, it was real. I was smitten in an instant. After all that time enmeshed in Yoga’s web, I saw clearly. I didn’t have to lie to myself. There was nothing to pretend not to see. I didn’t have to be guarded in any way. Realizing that was such a relief … a weight lifted from my mind that I hadn’t known was there.
“The surprising thing is that Sereda grew fond of me as well. I wouldn’t have expected that.”
Thoughts crowd in on me, and I let my daughter see them.
Sereda spooning broth into my mouth. Sereda telling me of the songbirds in her bower whom she refused to cage. Sereda taking snow to chill the drink she would offer me in a few moments while chattering about her childhood. Sereda humming. Sereda laughing at something I’d said.
Sereda leaning over me and pressing a soft kiss on my dry and burning forehead.
The shard of ice in my heart beginning to melt.
Of course, it couldn’t last.
I’ve wandered off again. The child — my daughter, Sereda’s daughter, who doesn’t know how much of her mother is in her, whom I dare not tell how much she looks like her grandmother once did — is looking at me, waiting for me to go on. Her eyes are shining, but I am not sure if it is happiness or tears provoked by that sight of her mother.
“Sereda — Seredushka — would sneak into my room far more often than she was supposed to. We talked for hours, day after day. Just seeing her, just hearing her laugh, made my strength return. I was growing much stronger than Yoga had planned on. Seredushka and I falling in love was an extra ingredient in the healing potion that no one could have counted on. It’s not an ingredient you can add to a recipe. You can’t plan on it. You can’t trap love in a bottle and dole it out drop by drop. But when it happens, when it truly happens, when neither partner has any second thoughts and their love is as pure as your mother’s soul, it intensifies the power of a good spell or potion.
“So I was growing stronger. Not necessarily wiser, though. I couldn’t think of leaving Sereda, and I didn’t think to ask her to come with me. I wasn’t sure she cared for me quite that much, and I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing her refuse.
“And then one day, Yoga found us together.”
Suddenly she was there, standing in the doorway. My arm was around Sereda’s shoulder and her head was resting on my chest. There was no way to hide, no explanation for our posture. Yoga knew.
I had never truly understood the meaning of fear before.
Yoga’s eyes darkened. They crackled with blue sparks of energy, and I saw the black tar of her soul flooding them. Her beauty was as terrifying as flames on the edge of a blade. Fattened on my own prana, she was as powerful as she had ever been or would ever be, more powerful than any witch had ever been, more powerful by far than I was. She didn’t speak; she didn’t need to. Rage was etched in every line of her body.
I had seen all this before Sereda had time to turn and see her mother. So it was I who saw our death written in Yoga’s now-dark eyes. Or, since I cannot die, our pain.
My one thought was to shield Sereda from this knowledge. To keep her heart from breaking.
I interrupt this flood of memories before the child can see them. There is no need to frighten her.
“Your grandmother was … displeased,” I say.
“She got angry?”
“Yes. You could say that.”
Memories fill my mind again.
The first blow came almost immediately, an instinctive lashing out on Yoga’s part with no thought behind it, a curse whistling through the air like a whip and smashing me across the face. Sereda tumbled from me and fell to the ground, her head striking the table. She slumped to the floor, knocked unconscious before she could realize what was happening. Good, I thought. I can concentrate better if she can’t distract me … protect her better.
I ignored the pain and looked at Yoga’s face to see if lashing out had been enough, if she was likely to calm down.
But no. She was gathering her strength, her knowledge. Gathering up her power and letting her soul flood it so that her next blow would be more effective than the first.
“Furious might be a better way to describe it,” I tell the child. “She shattered the air with her curses. Threw everything that she could think of at us. I was stronger than I had been, but I wasn’t strong enough to fight back. All I could do was shield us, protect us, try to deflect Yoga’s curses. It wasn’t easy. She showed no sign of faltering, of calming down. No, her rage grew the longer she couldn’t hurt us. I remember her pausing at one point, having to take a breath, spittle dripping from her open mouth, even the rasp of her breathing filled with hate. Then she gathered up her power and struck again.”
I remember much more than that, but there is already enough fear in my daughter’s eyes. She doesn’t need to know how Yoga was like a cobra spitting venom, like a blood-hungry boar sharpening its tusks, like a lioness bristling with claws. How she feinted, light on her feet as a fencer, trying to get past my guard, yet her every blow as heavy as an ax swung overhead, as a hammer smashing against rock. She doesn’t need to hear the echoes of Yoga’s spells streaming from her mouth, pure vocalizations of her fury transformed into deadly vibrations. The attack was constant and unending, and I felt the floor shaking. I was unable to do anything but crouch over Sereda, hold her to my heart, and hope that love could work on shielding spells as well as it did on healing potions.
There was a moment’s pause. I dared to look. Yoga was half-crouched over, her eyes narrowed, thinking. The next attack would be worse.
But that was when I saw our one hope of escape: the color of Yoga’s hair.
It had begun to turn gray.
“I thought her screaming was going to bring down her house and crush us,” I say to Anna Sophia. “She must have built it solidly. But she used so much power… That was the day she aged and became an old woman — a Baba. You remember how, as she drained my magic, I grew weaker? The same thing happened to her. She had amassed so much power, but she threw it all at us. So much of it in so short a time… She aged. Her hair started to turn gray, her perfect skin grew liver spots, and the flesh began to hang off her bones. She must have noticed me realizing this because she paused in her attack to look at her hands and some strands of her hair. I don’t know if she figured out what was happening. I took the chance, grabbed your mother, and leaped from the room. And we ran.”
“Did Baba Yaga follow you?”
“No. But she continued to curse us. She stood on the roof of her house and watched and threw even more spells at us. I couldn’t believe it. She must have realized what was happening to her, but she didn’t care. She called down lightning to try to strike us; she made the earth shake beneath our feet. I’d never seen such a display. She ground down her own teeth to call the thunder, causing a hailstorm that raged all day around us as we escaped. I’m still not sure how we did. It was … terrifying.”
The details Anna So
phia doesn’t need to know crowded behind my eyes.
Fissures gaped in the earth around us, and we could hear Yoga’s screams borne to us on the wind. The lightning flashed around us, strangely colored, clearly attempting to find us. Hailstones thicker than cherries struck around us, blinding us. The thunder rumbled so loudly, it was as if it were inside us, shuddering in our bones and veins. We wrapped our arms around each another, Sereda’s warmth the only thing I was certain of, the only proof she was still there, still alive.
I could hear Seredushka crying. She was probably in shock, suddenly cast out from everything she had known. But her soul still shone.
There was another crack of lightning. And then a more terrifying sound: as if from only meters away, the sound of an enraged tiger in the taiga. One of those roars that turns your very guts to water, that leaves you paralyzed for the moments it takes the beast to reach you.
It was not a real tiger, though. I recognized Baba Yoga’s voice. I looked up and froze.
The sky was ablaze.
She had called fire itself down from the heavens, and it was gathering in a whirlpool to strike us like a fist.
“Terrifying…” I repeat. My mind is wandering again. “All we could do was huddle together and hope it would end, hope she would exhaust herself, and in the end, she must have…”
The fire fell. Huddled on our knees together, we looked at each another, not knowing what would happen. Sereda’s soul, white though it was, was burning less brightly, tarnished by fear and pain.
I looked at her. “I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” she said. And suddenly, desperately, we were kissing, and I raised a fist against the heavens as they showered fire on us and the flames broke around us like water on a rock.
Anna Sophia’s voice jolts me out of my memories.
“Was that when you went to Uncle Misha together?”
I start.
“Yes. Of course, you’d know some of this already, wouldn’t you?” I should have thought of that, instead of losing myself in recollections I spend all my days going over anyway. “Did the Great Trapper tell you about that?”
“Yes,” she says. Quickly, as though she is worried I might think I was boring her, she adds, “But I don’t know very much more than that, not all these details. Just that you’d been there and that … and that, at some point, you gave Mom your heart.”
“Yes…” I say. “My heart. It’s a silly phrase, you know, you hear people say that their beloved has stolen their heart. But I suppose I felt that Sereda had. And I actually am able to make that saying real. So yes, I gave Seredushka my heart as a sign of love, a sign of trust. And she hid it. I didn’t ask where.
“There’s not much else to tell. After we had left the Great Trapper, time passed. We were happy although there was a blight on Sereda’s soul: the sorrow left by the break with her mother, the thought that her mother hated her. Then one day a raven came bearing a letter. It was from Baba Yoga, of course. She told us she’d repented, she’d forgiven us. She asked us to forgive her rage and said that she wanted to make amends. She wanted us to be a family. She wrote that immortality was lonely and we who were afflicted with it — that was her word, ‘afflicted’ — should be friends.
“I didn’t trust her. Not a word. Not just because I remembered what had happened the last time she had talked about loneliness. I knew that this woman, this being I’d known for millions of years, this walking cloud of utter darkness, had never been up to any good. Even the slightest action she’d taken that might have seemed in her favor had been done for her own purposes. There wasn’t a redeeming spot on the entire sulfuric, stinking surface of her soul. So I told Seredushka we had to ignore the letter.”
“What happened? Why didn’t you?”
I shake my head regretfully. I don’t know how the child will take what I’m about to say. Am I about to praise her mother — or condemn her? I have never been able to decide.
“I told you, most people’s souls are mingled shades. It’s how they can deal with an imperfect world where there are no absolutes — and it’s because they mindlessly waste all their precious energy. It’s how they can bend when they have to, how they can convince themselves to ignore their feelings when their reason tells them to. But your mother’s soul was untainted. White as fresh snow, though muted now by her sorrow. The moment she read the letter, before I could express my doubts, that shadow lifted. Her soul burned as bright as ever, just at the thought of reconciliation.
“When I told her we couldn’t go, the shadow returned. She fretted for days. Then she told me that she needed to visit her mother, she trusted her plea for forgiveness, she couldn’t believe otherwise, and she couldn’t bear to keep living with all this hatred.
“I tried to prevent her. Not by force; how could I? I loved her… But I tried to stop her. I failed. She was determined and stubborn — as I suspect you are.”
She is, I can tell, and her sudden shy grin confirms it. She couldn’t have made it here otherwise. She gets it from her mother … and her grandmother. Not all of Baba Yoga’s traits are inherently bad.
“And when she came here, Baba Yaga took her hostage?” she asked.
“Of course. She didn’t make it obvious at first; she played the happy mother. And the happy grandmother-to-be since Sereda was pregnant with you. A little later, she began to ask about my heart. I’d warned Sereda about this, but she was so happy, so trusting that she didn’t see the trap until after she’d already admitted that she’d hidden my heart somewhere. She was smart enough not to reveal anything about where, though. And realizing she had learned all she could, Baba Yoga locked her up.”
“But she got away. I know this part of the story. She got away and escaped to Mama Bear’s den.”
“Yes,” I say. “If you know that, then you know all there is to the story, really.”
“But how are you here? That’s the part I don’t understand. How did she catch you?”
I close my eyes. I am about to hurt her, to lay a burden on her she does not expect.
“The same way she does everything: tricks and lies. She sent me a message saying that she’d captured you.”
I look. Her eyes are wide in shock, her mouth half-open, and I can see guilt gathering over her like a cloud. But I must tell her all, tell her the truth.
“She sent me a morok, an evil dream that showed you sitting here in this cage, trembling and afraid. Alone. I believed that dream and I panicked… So I came here to look for you. She drew me in and trapped me like a bird in this magical cage.”
Anna Sophia’s eyes have filled with tears. And I feel my own weakness. I have used too much of what little energy I have left to speak with my daughter.
* * *
Koschey gently took my hand off his forehead, severing that magic pathway into his very mind. I looked around me, disoriented, unable to focus my eyes on anything in the room.
Now that our direct connection was broken, I felt lonely — even abandoned. For a moment, I felt like I was back in the orphanage, with no one truly caring about my existence.
But that was wrong, of course. My father was right here before me, and I knew that he cared.
He was seated again, his eyes closed, breathing deeply as if he’d just run a race.
I stood in silence, wondering what to do, finding no obvious solutions, trying to ignore the heaviness in my heart.
Eventually, Dad opened his eyes and said, “You should go now. I doubt your grandmother will be able to tolerate Leshiy for too much longer.”
“I’ll see you soon, Dad,” I said, my voice trembling. And then, impulsively, I added, “I love you.”
He smiled and patted my hand through the bars of his cage. “I love you too, Malyshka.” He pressed my hand in his a little longer.
“And listen,” he said. “Listen to my words and believe them, for they are true: It is not your fault that I am here.”
It was all I could do to gulp and nod. And then I couldn�
�t bear it any longer. I pulled my hand away, closed the door on him, and ran into my bedroom and cried.
Chapter 16
Dear Diary,
It doesn’t matter what my father says. Even if he’s right that it’s not my fault he’s a prisoner, I still feel responsible. And I’m the only person who can help him. Though despite what he probably thinks, I’m not alone; I’ve got Squire.
I’ve just got to be sure not to let Baba Yaga trick my memory anymore. I’ll have to be careful and act like I still think I’ve lived here all my life. I have no idea if I know how to act, but I guess I’m going to find out.
I’ve also got to practice getting and keeping energy. I don’t know if my grandmother is going to keep siphoning it from me, but I know I’ll need as much magic as I can get to rescue Dad.
I am going to rescue him, however difficult it looks. I mustn’t forget that that’s why I’m here.
I need a plan and an opportunity…
* * *
When I stopped crying and came out of my bedroom, the sleeping hands were dotted around everywhere, lying about like so many statuettes of white bone. I took a deep breath and lit a candle. One by one, I woke the hands with a small flame, and they resumed their tasks once again as if nothing had happened.
Satisfied that I’d done my best to erase all traces of my adventure, I went to switch on the TV in the bedroom. I wanted Granny to think that I’d slept for most of the time and watched TV during the rest. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to conceal the return of my memories, though, so I had to be very careful.
I had my eyes trained on the screen when my grandmother’s mortar landed with a loud crash in the yard. I decided not to meet her at the door; I would pretend to be sleepy instead. The less I saw of her, the better.
