Anya slid the Torah off the high shelf and carried it to the table. She removed the cover, spread it on the tabletop in front of Babulya, and set the scroll on top of the smoothed cloth. She went back to the bookshelf to retrieve the wooden pointer Papa had carved after the one Babulya had brought from Sarkel broke.
Babulya ran her wrinkled fingers over the scroll’s handles as Anya sat back down at the table. She bent forward to kiss the scroll, then pointed for Anya to do the same.
“When I was your age, I had to read out loud to the women of my synagogue,” Babulya said. “But you’re lucky. You just have to read to your mama and me. Do you know what you want to read for your bat mitzvah yet?”
Anya didn’t. She knew it had to be good. Poignant. “No.”
Babulya sighed. “You’d better figure it out! Where did we leave off?”
Anya rolled the Torah open, using the end of the pointer to find her spot. “Moshe on the mountain.”
“Ah yes,” Babulya said. “This part is very important. These are the Commandments. You must know them by heart.”
Anya nodded and began reading, tracing along the words with the pointer so her fingers wouldn’t smudge the aging ink. She stumbled over some of the Hebrew; in places the text was so old, the letters were worn away, and in others she couldn’t remember where the vowels were supposed to go. It was tough enough to read it just to Babulya, and she couldn’t imagine reading it aloud to a larger group of people.
“You shall not . . .” She squinted at the degraded word on the paper. “Tir . . . Ra . . . Rets—”
“Tirtzach,” Babulya said. “Kill.”
“You shall not kill,” Anya said.
Babulya shook her head emphatically. “That’s an unforgivable sin, Annushka. Murder, idolatry, and adultery. Never. Never, ever.”
“But what if you have to kill someone?” Anya asked.
Babulya snorted. “Why would you have to?”
Anya shrugged. “What if they were going to kill you first?”
“Does it say in there, ‘You shall not kill, unless the other person was going to kill you first’?”
Anya turned her eyes back to the parchment. She hadn’t been through the Torah as much as Babulya had. Twice by now, but she didn’t know every single word of every single verse. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I know,” Babulya said. “And it doesn’t.” She lifted a wrinkled finger. “In the Talmud, it says, ‘Whoever destroys a single life has destroyed the entire world.’ Do you want to destroy the entire world?”
“No.” Anya held in a groan. Now she was bringing the Talmud into it. Something else she needed to read more of.
“There you have it, then,” Babulya said.
Anya mulled over what Babulya had said, not sure if she completely bought into it. It didn’t seem right that it was forbidden for her to protect herself. She was pretty sure she remembered some passage somewhere saying it was okay to kill someone for specific reasons. She didn’t argue with Babulya because she didn’t remember the passage well enough, and coming at her grandmother half-informed was a terrible mistake. Babulya was knowledgeable because she was so old, but Papa had gone through the Torah and both their copies of the Talmud back and forth probably a hundred times in the twenty years since he converted. He and Babulya had heated discussions about every individual letter, it seemed. Anya wished he were there so they could discuss killing, but he wasn’t. Maybe that could be what she read for her bat mitzvah: all the reasons killing was acceptable.
That seemed like a strange thing to focus on as she entered womanhood, though.
With a sigh, she went back to reading as before, and made it to the end of the Commandments before Babulya stopped her.
“That was very good,” Babulya said. “You’re getting better.”
“Thanks, Babulya.”
“Yes,” Mama’s sad voice said from the kitchen. “Very good, Anya.”
Her mother’s voice startled Anya. She hadn’t realized Mama had come inside.
“It’s almost time for Havdalah,” Babulya said. “Go watch for the stars.”
Anya looked out the window at the dimming day, wondering once again how Babulya knew some of the things she knew—like that it was almost sunset, even though she was blind. Anya put the Torah back on its high shelf and then shuffled outside, lingering near the house as she watched the eastern sky for the first three stars that would mark the end of Shabbat and the start of the new week.
Three stars twinkled in the purpling sky over the treetops. Back inside, Dyedka waited impatiently for dinner as Mama set out the spice box, a cup of wine, and the braided candle Papa had made. Havdalah was short: four simple blessings, a sip of wine, smelling the spices, and extinguishing the candle. The candle flame hissed out in the leftover wine, and Mama said, “Shavua tov.”
Have a good week. Anya planned to.
* * *
Anya hunched over her dress that Zvezda had torn the day before, drawing a needle and thread through the cloth to repair the tear. She didn’t want to patch it, and she was trying to make her stitches as invisible as possible so no one would be able to tell it had been torn in the first place.
Babulya sat across the table, knitting the lumpiest scarf Anya had ever seen. She suspected it would probably be for her. Mama had gone to bed, and Dyedka carved at the end of his walking stick with a knife, forming a goat’s head out of the knobby top.
Anya’s stitching wasn’t going like she’d planned. She was distracted. She couldn’t get the red spiny fish thing out of her head. She kept telling herself it was a dragon but then telling herself there was no way it was a dragon, and back and forth. If it was a dragon, she could tell Yedsha about it, and hopefully it wouldn’t take him long to figure out how to trap it. Then she’d get the money and she could pay the magistrate and save her home.
She wondered if Yedsha would give her the money immediately, or if he would pay her once he took the monster to Kiev. How far away was Kiev? Days? Weeks?
How far away from Kiev was Rûm? Could Yedsha drop off the dragon and then pick up Papa? The old geography book had maps in it. She set her dress down and retrieved the book from the shelf, flipping pages until she found a map. Kiev was up at the top, and down below, on the southern shores of the Black Sea, was Rûm.
On the opposing page, a portrait of the old sultan of Rûm gazed out at her. The caption beneath said, “Sultan Osman the Merciful.” He was young, smiling slightly, and looked pretty merciful to Anya. Too bad he wasn’t the sultan anymore. The new one was Sultan Osman’s son, Suleiman the Unsmiling. There was no portrait of him, but Anya imagined his title was “the Unsmiling” for a reason.
Dyedka leaned over toward her. “Maybe your papa will kill the sultan, and he can come back home.”
“Maybe.”
“What are you looking in there for?” Dyedka asked.
“I want to know how far away Kiev is,” Anya said.
Dyedka snorted. “Are you planning a trip?”
“No,” Anya said. “Just curious.”
“It’s a long way,” Dyedka said. “Depends on how you get there. On foot? I don’t recommend it. On horseback or in a carriage, twelve, thirteen days, if you travel all day.”
Anya drummed her fingers on the book as Dyedka went back to carving his stick. That didn’t seem so far. Hauling a dragon would probably slow them down by a day or two, but still. Two weeks and this would all be over.
Her mind went again to the spiny red thing in the river. She decided that if she slept in the barn, she ran the risk of being eaten by a dragon.
But then, so did the goats and chickens. They didn’t have a choice but to sleep in the barn. She should make sure the barn was closed up tight against any dragon invasion. Plus, she could protect them if anything did come in.
Anya kissed Babulya on the cheek before heading for the door.
“Sleeping in the barn tonight?” Babulya asked.
“Yes,” Anya said.
&nb
sp; “Take something for the domovoi,” Babulya said. “He’s still upset.”
Anya said good night to Dyedka before grabbing half of the remaining bread from the counter and a lantern from the floor. She lit the lantern before she let herself out of the house and into the night.
As soon as she crossed the garden, Anya could hear the chickens raising a huge ruckus inside the barn. The goats were bellyaching as well, bleating loud enough to compete with the chickens.
Anya’s stomach knotted as she hurried to the barn. It was most likely the chickens and the goats getting into a turf war again.
Or so she hoped.
She threw open the barn door and stepped inside, lifting the lantern up to get a better look at the situation.
Anya’s hands went numb from shock. She dropped the loaf of bread at her feet and barely managed to keep a hold on the lantern.
Most of the chickens were up in the rafters of the barn, screeching at the scene on the floor below. The goats stood around the walls, bleating as they watched the domovoi in the shape of a cat run around on the floor, hissing and spitting, dodging the claws and teeth of the red dragon that lunged at him.
Chapter Fourteen
The dragon was at least twice as long as Anya was tall, and a deep red that reflected the lantern’s light like a vest of rubies. It had two legs near the front of its long, snakelike body, and it used them to propel itself around the barn in pursuit of the feline house spirit. Its long tail whipped behind it as it ran; a row of spines stretched from its head to the tip of its tail, colored gold and reddish gold. As it snapped at the domovoi, its teeth flashed in the lantern light.
It had only one head, and it didn’t seem to be interested in the goats at all.
Anya stood by the door, incredulous, convinced she must be having a hallucination of some kind, when the domovoi spotted her.
He meowed loudly and ran to Anya, leaping to her shoulders and digging his claws into her. He yowled and spat at the dragon.
The dragon coiled, motionless. Its eyes met Anya’s, slit pupils slicing a black scar through each bright blue eye. Its mouth gaped open, teeth shining, tongue lolling. Two straight horns jutted from above its eyes, pointing backward. Anya could envision herself impaled on those horns.
She wouldn’t die like that in her own barn with the chickens watching. Anya snatched a pitchfork from its place on the wall, pointing the pronged end at the dragon. She hoped it couldn’t see her shaking.
Atop her shoulders, the domovoi quaked and hissed. She winced as his claws dug deeper, stabbing through her dress and poking holes in her skin.
The dragon watched the pitchfork, eyeing it with what Anya could swear was something close to scrutiny. The face-off lasted for seconds that stretched into eternity, and then, with the scrabbling of claws, the dragon fled to the darkness at the rear of the barn. Anya flinched at the sound of wood splintering and then . . . silence.
She remained still, trembling as the chickens and goats recovered from their fright and began to gobble up the bread on the ground. The domovoi growled deep in his throat, claws still in Anya’s shoulders.
She shrugged until the domovoi slid off her back. He stayed by her feet, staring at where the dragon had vanished. All the hair on his back stood straight up.
After a few minutes, Anya advanced to the rear of the barn, ready to stab the dragon in the face if it came for her. Her legs trembled as she willed them to hold her weight. The pitchfork’s wood felt slick in her sweaty hands, and she hoped she wouldn’t drop it at the moment of truth.
There was nothing there. Besides the goats and chickens and growling domovoi, the barn was still and empty.
Anya’s breath hitched in her chest. She couldn’t have imagined the dragon, could she? Maybe she had eaten some bad food. Perhaps dinner had been spoiled or had some sort of toxin in it. Maybe she was going mad.
She looked down. The domovoi paced, stiff-legged, back and forth. If she had imagined the dragon, then so had the domovoi, and that wasn’t likely.
She pressed on, to be sure. In the corner behind Dyedka’s goat cart, a large hole had been made in the side of the barn. Something glittered in the lantern light, and when Anya inspected further, she saw a broad red scale stuck to a piece of wood.
Chapter Fifteen
Anya didn’t sleep.
She lay in the hayloft with the chickens gathered around her until morning. Dyedka’s goat cart sat in front of the hole in the barn. Anya had pushed it there, then reinforced it with whatever she could move on her own. Every tiny noise made her startle, pitchfork in hand. The dragon didn’t come back. She might have chalked it up to an extremely vivid nightmare in the light of day, if it hadn’t been for the glittering ruby scale in her pocket and the domovoi’s refusal to come out from the cellar.
The barn door opened, and Dyedka hobbled in. He grunted with every step, heading for his cart, and hollered, “Get up, lazybones!”
Anya peered over the side of the hayloft. “I’m already up, Dyedka.”
“Liar.” Dyedka chuckled. “You sound half-asleep.”
She would have liked to be fully asleep. She expected the dragon wouldn’t return during the day, and this knowledge turned off whatever inside her had been keeping her awake. Her eyelids drooped.
“I’m fine,” Anya said.
Dyedka laughed from below. “Well, that’s what you—what the . . . ?”
He trailed off, and only then did Anya remember the gaping hole behind his cart, and her attempts to barricade it. She was awake then and slid down the ladder as fast as she could. Dyedka stood by the pile of stuff in front of the hole, scratching his head, eyebrows furrowed with bewilderment.
He gestured to the pile. “What happened here?”
Anya shrugged. “I don’t know, Dyedka.” She searched her exhausted brain for some explanation. “Maybe the domovoi did it.”
“Why would he . . . ?” Dyedka leaned closer to the pile.
“He was angry,” Anya said. “He broke the milk bottles. Maybe this is his way of still being mad.”
Dyedka turned to fix her with a raised eyebrow. “Maybe.”
Anya hoped the domovoi wouldn’t appear and blow her story somehow. He didn’t, and then one of the goats bleated. They were hungry and ready to go graze. Pulling away, Dyedka mumbled, “Bizarre.”
Anya nodded and helped Dyedka dig out the cart. She was careful to keep the hole itself blocked so he wouldn’t notice it as she hooked his billy goats into their traces. She waved as he rode away with the goats following, and as soon as he was out of sight, she slammed the barn doors shut.
* * *
Anya got dressed without seeing Mama or Babulya and made sure to transfer the dragon scale from her old dress to the new one. She half ran, half walked toward the village, nearly frantic to see Ivan.
She crossed the bridge into the village. The square was mostly empty, except for an enormous gray horse that swished its tail in front of the smithy.
Anya slowed and stared at the horse. It was Sigurd’s.
Urgency to see Ivan forgotten, she backtracked to the miller’s shop and went behind the row, running to the smithy’s back door. She pulled the door open slowly, and as soon as the forge’s heat blasted into her face, so did angry, heated words.
Sigurd. She’d never forget the sound of his voice.
He was speaking harshly, presumably to Kin. Anya pulled the door open a little more, enough to put one side of her face through and see the back of the smithy. Piles of metal scrap sat here and there, with three anvils positioned around the forge itself. On the other side were two figures.
Anya watched as the taller figure, Sigurd, spat furiously at the shorter figure. Kin didn’t flinch, at least as far as Anya could tell, and when he spoke, it was measured and calm.
It was also in Sigurd’s tongue.
Sigurd shoved something long at Kin, and Kin shook his head as he tried to hand it back.
Slam! The noise made Anya jump. She wasn’
t sure what exactly had caused it, but she knew Sigurd had done something to Kin’s forge. Sigurd shoved Kin’s chest, said one more thing in a threatening hiss, and then stormed out the front of the smithy.
Kin remained where he was. As Anya watched, his shoulders slumped. He looked down at the long object in his hands and sighed.
Anya was ready to back away from the door when Kin’s voice pierced the heat: “Ye don’t have to spy from the door, girl. Come in if yer gonna be nosy.”
Her heart thudded hard in her chest. She pulled the door open more and slid into the sweltering smithy. Kin set the long object down on top of an anvil and crossed his arms as she approached.
“Well,” he said.
“Well,” Anya mumbled. They stood in silence for a breath, and then Anya blurted, “So you are a Varangian, huh?”
“I am not a Varangian.” Kin’s jaw tightened.
“But how do you—”
“I was stolen by them,” Kin said. “All right? When I was as old as ye, maybe a mite older. They came to my village and took me from my family, sailed me over a great sea back to their land, and kept me as a slave until I ran away. There. Now ye know, and now ye can stop being so blasted curious about it.”
Anya listened, lips pressed shut and eyes open wide. His revelation made her even more curious. How had he escaped? Why had they kidnapped him? What had brought him to Zmeyreka?
She pointed to her own cheeks, mirroring where his tattoo spread. “Did they do that to you?”
He touched it, frowning. “No. I had that before.”
“What did—”
“Girl, yer trying my patience.”
“—Sigurd want?” she finished.
He snorted a sigh out of his nose. “He wants me to sharpen his sword.”
Anya and the Dragon Page 9
