Deathless

7 The Country of Life

Where is the country of the Tsar of Life? When the world was young the seven Tsars and Tsaritsas divided it amongst themselves. The Tsar of the Birds chose the air and the clouds and the winds. The Tsaritsa of Salt chose the cities with all their bustle and heedless hurtling. The Tsar of Water chose the seas and lakes, bays and oceans. The Tsaritsa of Night chose all the dark places and the places between, the thresholds, the shadows. The Tsaritsa of the Length of an Hour chose sorrow and misfortune as her territory, so that where anyone suffers, there is her country. This left only the Tsar of Life and the Tsar of Death to argue over what remained. For a time, they were content to quarrel over individual trees, stones, and streams, giving each other great whacks with that scythe which Death wields to cut down all that lives, and that hammer which Life wields, which builds up useful and lovely things such as fences and churches and potato distilleries. However, Life and Death are brothers, and their ambition is precisely equal.

Their rivalry soon encompassed whole towns, rivers (which rightly belonged to neither, but neutrality is no defense), provinces, and beachheads, until the struggle of it consumed the whole of the world. If a town managed a granary of fine brick and half a head of good cabbage to share between them, then Death arrived with white banners like bones, and withered the place with a single stomp. If a village were hollowed out by plague or war, its streets lit by skulls hoisted up on pikes and blood poisoning the well water, then still green shoots would grow wild in the offal-rich gutters, still the last woman standing would grow great in the belly. There could be no agreement between them.

At last, with every inch of earth divided and subdivided, the loam and clay themselves could bear no more. The mountains yielded up their iron and their copper, and the Tsaritsa of Salt slyly taught men her most secret mechanisms, for of all her brothers and sisters, the Tsaritsa of Salt best knew civilized things, things made and not born. Up rose looms and threshers and plows and engines, stoves and syringes and sanitation departments, trains and good shoes. And so the Tsar of Life triumphed, and children upon children were born.

But the Tsar of Death is wily. Soon the looms bit off the fingers of their minders, and smoke clotted breath, and the great engines spat out explosives and helmets and automated rifles as well as shoes. Soon folk of the city requisitioned the grain of the villages, and stored it up in great vaults, and argued over its distribution while it moldered, and wrote long books on the righteousness of this, and Death, iron-shod, copper-crowned, danced.

The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature—but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end to their argument, we shall have none, not ever, until the end of all.

So where is the country of the Tsar of Death? Where is the nation of the Tsar of Life? They are not so easy to find, yet each day you step upon both one hundred times or more. Every portion of earth is infinitely divided between them, to the smallest unit of measure, and smaller yet. Even the specks of soil war with one another. Even the atoms strangle each other in their sleep. To reach the country of the Tsar of Life, which is both impossibly near and hopelessly far, you must not wish to arrive there, but approach it stealthily, sideways. It is best to be ill, in a fever, a delirium. In the riot of sickness, when the threatened flesh rouses itself, all redness and fluid and heat, it is easiest to topple over into the country you seek.

Of course, it is just as easy, in this manner, to reach the country of the Tsar of Death. Travel is never without risk.

Zemlehyed the leshy squinted at the great black book. With one gnarled, mossy hand, he shook it by its corner. A few leaves fell on it from the canopy of birches. Sunlight spilled down through the white branches, cool and golden and crisp. The coal-colored spine of the heavy volume glittered where the waxy autumnal light struck it. Dubiously, the leshy gave the cover a good gnaw. He wrinkled his burl-nose. Zemlehyed looked more or less like what you would get if a particularly stunted and ugly oak tree had fallen passionately in love with a boulder and produced, at great cost to both, a single child. His mistletoe eyebrows waggled.

“Why she read this none-sense? It’s got no pictures. Also, boring.”

Naganya the vintovnik rolled her eye. She had only one to roll, since her left eye was less an eye than a rifle scope, jutting out from her skull, made of bone and glassy thumbnail. Nevertheless, she wore half a pair of spectacles over the other eye, for she felt naked and embarrassed without some sort of lens to look through. The imp’s walnut skin gleamed from attentive polishing, though her blackened, ironwork sinews showed through in places: her elbows, her cheek, the backs of her knees.

“Don’t you pay attention? Likho gave it to her.” Naganya sniffed ostentatiously. She produced a grey handkerchief and wiped a trickle of black oil from her nose. “Still, I don’t approve. Histories are instruments of oppression. Writers of histories ought to be shot on sight.”

Zemlehyed snorted. “Who’s this Tsar of Life? Never met the man.”

“Who do you think, rock-brain? He’s not called Deathless for nothing.” Naganya peered at the book for a moment, clicking her tongue against her teeth. It made a horrid mechanical noise, like a gun cocking and uncocking. “You’re right, though. It is boring. Overwritten. I’m surprised you can read it at all.”

“Nor good to eat! Shit! Why not tear it up and bury it? Some nice tree have a good munch, eh?” Zemlehyed spat a glob of golden sap on their picnic blanket. Naganya grimaced.

“Why the tsarevna lets you blunder after her is a mystery to me. You’re disgusting. But if you want to wreck her things, be my guest. At least the evisceration will be amusing. What do leshiyi look like on the inside? All mud and sticks?”

“Paws off, gun-goblin! My insides; my property!”

“Property is theft!” snapped Naganya, her cheek-pistons clicking. “Therefore, just by sitting there you’re stealing from the People, Zemya! Bandit! Ring the alarms!”

Zemlehyed spat again.

“But Zemya,” she whined, “I’m bored! Why don’t I interrogate you again? It’ll be fun! I’ll leave my safety on this time, I promise.”

The leshy gnashed his stone teeth with their rime of muck. “Nasha, why you only bored when I’m around? Get bored with someone else!”

Through the bramble-thicket two horses exploded, their riders flattened against their backs. The black one raced ahead, a young woman shrieking laughter in her green enamel saddle, her dark hair streaming, braided wildly with garnets and rough sea amber, her hunting cloak a red sail. She darted expertly between the pale, bony birches, ducking boughs heavy with yellow leaves and thin, brown vines sagging with ruby-colored berries. Behind her leapt a white mare and a pale lady riding sidesaddle, every bit as keen and fierce as the black rider, the swan feathers in her snowy hair flying off in pale clouds. Their stamping hooves set up whirlwinds of old orange leaves as they galloped past.

“Did it come this way?” cried Marya Morevna, her eyes blazing, reining her dark horse in and circling impatiently.

“Who?” barked the leshy.

“My firebird! Got moss in your ears again, Zemya?”

“You’re too slow,” sighed Naganya. “It blew through here over an hour ago. Singed my hair, which naturally incinerated most of our lunch.” Naganya’s hair glistened, wet and dark with gun-oil, reeking of gasoline.

“Well, then,” said Madame Lebedeva, leaping lightly from her horse and adjusting her elegant white hat, which still had several of its swan plumes attached. At her throat, a pearly cameo gleamed, showing a perfect profile of herself. “I, for one, shall have a cup of tea and a rest. Firebirds are such frustrating quarry. One minute it’s all fiery tail feathers and red talons and the next, nothing but ash and a sore seat.” She knotted her mare to a larch tree and settled down on the slightly sappy picnic blanket, brushing invisible dust from her white jodhpurs and blazer.

Marya leaned her hunting rifle up against a fire-colored maple and fell in a heap onto the blanket. She hugged Zemya vigorously—which is the only way to do anything involving a leshy—and planted a kiss on his oak-bark cheek. The hunt had gotten her blood and her hungers up—she vibrated with excitement.

“What have we to eat?” Marya asked cheerfully, her jewel-strewn hair falling over one shoulder. She wore a smart black suit, half uniform, half hunting dress.

“Burnt toast, burnt pirozhki, onions both pickled and burnt. I believe even the tea has a distinct smoky flavor,” sighed the vintovnik.

“We can’t leave you alone for a second.” Madame Lebedeva scowled.

“Three hours, vila!” groused Zemlehyed, scratching his knees. “And she were interrogating me again. Look!” He displayed his hands, each of which had a neat bullet hole through the leafy palm. “The price of cronyism, she says!”

“Well, now, you have to admit, you do hew fairly close to the heels of the Tsar’s favorite.” Madame Lebedeva smiled.

“And you don’t? Where’s your price, eh?”

“I am very careful not to be alone with the zealous Nasha.” The vila sniffed. “This is the best way to avoid interrogations, I find.”

“Peace!” Marya Morevna laughed, holding up her hands. On each finger gleamed silver rings studded with rough, uncut malachites and rubies. “If you don’t behave, all of you, I shall not tell you any more stories about Petrograd!”

Naganya’s limpid eye filled with greasy black tears. “Oh, Masha, that’s not fair! How shall I further the Party’s interests in the hinterlands if you will not teach me about Marx and Papa Lenin?”

Zemya scowled, his mouth little more than a gap in the rock of his chin. “Who is Papa Lenin? Tfu! Zemlehyed has one Papa: Papa Koschei. He needs no nasty bald Papa Lenin!”

Marya Morevna’s face brightened and darkened all at once. She twisted the rings on her fingers. When she thought of Koschei, her blood boiled and froze all together. “Well, I’m sure that puts an end to the debate, Zem. Nasha?”

Naganya sighed dramatically. “I ought to go to Petrograd myself!” she wailed. “What use has a rifle imp out here where the best diversion for my sort is common hunting? How I long for real utility, to hunt out enemies of the People and put holes in them!”

Madame Lebedeva yawned and stretched her long arms. Her beauty was impossibly delicate and pointed, birdlike and nearly colorless, save for her dark, depthless eyes. “When is he going to marry you, Mashenka? How tiresome for you, to wait like this!”

“I don’t know, Lebed, my love. He is so occupied with the war, you know. All day and night in the Chernosvyat, poring over papers and troop allotments. Hardly a good time for a wedding.” In truth, Marya was tired of waiting. She squinted in the frosty sunlight, wishing to be Tsaritsa, to be safe here, to know she would not have to go home, back where she did not have a horse or firebirds to hunt, where she did not have such friends.

“Maybe he doesn’t love you anymore.” Naganya shrugged, her mouth half-full of pirozhki.

“Squirrel crap! Smashed snail’s got more sense than you,” growled Zemlehyed. “Papa can’t marry nobody. Not ’til she approves. Not ’til Babushka comes.”

“I wish she’d get a move on!” sighed Madame Lebedeva. She nibbled a bit of blackened onion. “I want to apply for the magicians’ dacha this summer. It’s quite competitive, and I can’t concentrate on my application while I’m worried half to death over Masha’s trousseau. The entrance essays are brutal, darlings.”

Naganya sniggered. “What’s a Petrograd girl’s trousseau? Horse shit and half a pint of Neva washing water?”

“I’m sure it’s no business of an imp,” Lebedeva snarled. “Leave it to those of us with a teaspoon of refinement to spare.”

“As if a vila witch knows anything but hair curlers and squinting for fortunes in a cup of piss!”

Naganya narrowed her monocled eye and spat. A neat little bullet erupted out of her mouth and punched through Madame Lebedeva’s swan feathers, blowing her hat quite off her head. She shrieked in indignation, her ice-white hair singed black at the tips. Madame scrambled after her hat.

“You beast! Marya! You must punish her! You made her swear not to shoot anyone this morning, and just look at her thwarting you!”

Marya Morevna pulled on a very solemn expression. She beckoned the vintovnik to her side with a crooked, jeweled finger.

“Nasha, you know you ought not to disobey me.”

Naganya fell silent. Her hands trembled; her ironworks clicked nervously in her cheek.

Suddenly, Marya’s hand flashed out and caught Naganya’s mouth and nose. With the other hand she grabbed the back of the vintovnik’s head. Naganya’s chest heaved, searching for breath, but Marya did not let go. She forced the imp to the ground, clamping her face in her fierce hand, leaping astride her, the better to pin her to the forest floor. Marya’s heart leapt and exulted in her. All unbidden she thought of a book of poems tossed into the snow, and a red scarf torn in half. She bore down harder. Slowly, black, oily tears pooled in Nasha’s eyes and trickled down over Marya Morevna’s knuckles as Nasha struggled, squirmed, and finally went still beneath her. Marya grinned, her braids brushing her friend’s walnut arms. Finally, she let Naganya up. The imp gasped and spluttered, chagrined and hoarse, wiping at her tears.

“Let that be a lesson,” Marya Morevna said cheerfully. “Mind your trigger in mixed company! When I tell you to do something you must do it.” Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding. Marya thought these thoughts, her breath and pulse calming. Of late, she had felt that coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.

Naganya sat shaking. Her breath came in gulps. She sniffed pitifully and pawed at her nose.

“Oh, Nasha!” Marya cried, feeling suddenly not cold at all and a little embarrassed. Perhaps she had gotten carried away—but imps listened to no one who could not thrash them soundly. A good Tsaritsa speaks her subjects’ language, after all. “Don’t be sad! I’ll find you a nice rusalka to snatch out of her lake in the middle of the night and throttle for information! Won’t that be lovely?”

Naganya smiled a little, mollified. A high walnut-colored blush rose in her cheeks, and Marya knew that she had enjoyed being punished, if only a little. She turned to the leshy.

“Now, Zemya—oh, give me back that book! You’ve bitten it half to pieces! Zemya, who is this Babushka you mean? I thought I had met everyone here!”

At that moment, a high, gorgeous cry echoed through the forest. An orange flame circled the clouds, so far up in the air that it seemed little more than a speck of fiery dust. Before Naganya could shout, Marya had snatched up her rifle, knelt, and fired.

With a searing, crackling crash, a firebird fell from the sky.

“Why do they call this place the Isle of Buyan?” Marya mused as the four of them strode back down Skorohodnaya Road. The sun set over the city ahead, spilling light over warm white cupolas carved from smooth, gleaming bone. The first dusting of snow glinted on the road, promising the sweetness of winter to come. “It’s not an island at all, as far as I can tell.”

“Used to be one,” said Zemlehyed, who was by far the oldest of them. “The unstopping salt sea. Your Lake Baikal? Tscha! Puddle! Our sea had fists, back in the yore.”

“It continues to be a marvel to me,” said Madame Lebedeva, her musical voice causing even her white horse to step lighter, “that leshiyi ever learned to speak. What sort of process was it, I wonder? Did a lonely hedgehog bash on a rock until it made noises?”

“Leshiyi learned from trees singing songs what birds taught, what birds learned from worms, what worms learned from dirt, what dirt learned from diamonds. Pedigreed, that’s us.”

“Well, I’m sure you were a very poor student, Zemya. You haven’t got the vocabulary of a salamander. In any event, Masha, darling, the Isle of Buyan was once, indeed, an island, in a great sea where fish the size of galleons swam in golden waves. They sang, those fish, such songs at sunrise. If you had a hundred balalaikas and a thousand gusli, you could not play a song equal to the least of theirs.”

“What happened?” Marya Morevna coaxed her black horse on ahead. He pulled a silver net behind him. Flaming feathers tufted out of it at every angle, scorching the earth beneath it as it dragged along.

Madame Lebedeva sighed. “What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up. First the great fish went belly up, one by one, their stomachs practically islands themselves. Then the water turned black and green, with mud currents all through it. Then the waves caught fire, and burned down to the seabed. The flames seared the stars—and then it was gone. Vapor and steam. All the whole of it, gone down into the coffers of the Tsar of Death. You can bet that in his country, there’s a ghost-sea full of ghost-fish still singing their songs, in a different key, with different words. And in our country, if you walk far enough out onto the plain, you’ll see great bones sticking out of the earth where the seabed used to be. Mountains lined with rib bones, valleys full of jaws.”

Marya rode in silence. Each time she learned something of the long history of Koschei’s country and the war with the Tsar of Death, she loved Buyan a little more fiercely, and feared the war a little more sharply.

“Shall we go mushroom picking tonight?” said Naganya softly, still abashed and thrilled by her punishment. “There’ll be a moon out, big as a bull’s-eye. And I’ve a belly for chanterelles.”

The motley party passed through the city gate, a palisade of tangled, towering antlers, each prong crowned with a grinning skull. Marya no longer thought it grisly or shuddered as she passed beneath the empty eye sockets. Now, the skulls seemed to smile at her, to say, We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.

Once the gates had shut behind them, shops and houses beamed within, their windows lit with red, happy fires. The Chernosvyat sprawled ahead, its black towers and red doors glinting. It looked so like the Kremlin that Marya had often thought the two must be brothers, separated at birth and set apart, one on either side of the world. Koschei lived in the biggest tower, its cupola drenched in garnets. But most folk lived somewhere in the Chernosvyat, in the smaller citadels and chapels and anterooms. The place grew by years, like a tree, like the house on Gorokhovaya Street—on Dzerzhinskaya Street. The old names swirled in Marya’s mind, flowing together and apart again until she could not remember which had come first.

The broad plain hosted many other houses and halls and hearths and hostelries rippling out from the black Kremlin like water. Marya hardly noticed anymore that the houses and halls had been patched together from the skins of many exotic and familiar beasts, their roofs thatched with long, waving hair, their eaves lined with golden braids. Fountains spurted hot, scarlet blood into glass pools, trickling pleasantly in the late afternoon light. A rich steam floated from their basins, and the occasional raven alighted to sip. Once Marya had screamed when a bloody fountain geysered up in its noontime display. Once she had felt sick when she saw the wall of a chapel prickle up in a sudden wind, just like skin. But the fountain had been much embarrassed, and she had been introduced to the chapel, whose name was Avdotia, and these things now seemed only right and lovely to Marya, just living things in the Country of Life, where even a fountain breathed and flowed with vital stuff. That was so long ago now, anyway, like the dream of another life.

“I think I am too tired for mushrooms, Nasha,” she said finally. “I will go to Koschei instead, and see if he has need of me. But,” she added magnanimously, “you may sleep with me tonight if you like, and have a tart with icing.” Did she enjoy punishing or rewarding more? Marya could not say. Everything in Buyan had a different pleasure to it, if only one learned how to find it.

The vintovnik brightened and danced a little down the long cobbled road. Zemlehyed grunted and punched the ground with his mossy fist.

“Cronyism!” he spat.

8 Sleep by Me

In the deepest, most hidden room of the Chernosvyat, whose ossified cupolas shone here and there with silver bubbles and steel cruciforms, Koschei the Deathless sat on his throne of onyx and bone. His eyes drooped, redly exhausted, from weeping or working or both. Before him, on a great table formed from the pelvic dish of some impossibly huge fish, lay scattered maps and plans and letters, papers and couriers’ boxes, photographs and sketches, books wedged open, upside down, splitting their spines.

Marya Morevna entered, her hunting costume half-open in the heat of the place. The dark walls of the Chernosvyat often seemed to breathe, and their breath came either brutally hot or mercilessly cold. Marya never knew which to expect. Silently, she walked around the long table and let a single golden feather drop. It drifted lazily down to rest on a requisition form. It no longer flamed, but glowed with a soft amber light.

“I would have preferred it living, volchitsa,” said Koschei, without looking up.

Marya shrugged. “It only died just now, as much of exhaustion from the hunt as the bullet.”

Koschei rose from his papers and drew her to him, bending to kiss her collarbone.

“I am proud of you, of course, beloved, baleful. But you must realize that you have only added a firebird to Viy’s cavalry. A black, flameless thing, its bony wings bearing ghost-pilots with their arms full of ordnance.”

Marya Morevna shut her eyes, savoring his lips on her skin as she savored the slab of black bread, buttered and spread with roe, once, long ago.

“It was hiding a clutch of eggs,” she breathed as he gripped her hair and tilted her head to show her throat, pale and bare. “In a short while we shall have enough firebirds to pull a siege tower, and still have one or two left over to light the hearth when we return.” His weight against her chilled and wakened her skin. She smiled against his dark glove. “Besides, it was tradition, once, for a suitor to fetch a firebird’s feather to show their good and marriageable qualities.”

“I know your qualities.”

Marya said nothing. She did not feel an urgency to marry, exactly—nothing like her sisters, who had longed for it like the prize at the end of a long and difficult game. But she did feel that as long as Koschei kissed her and kissed her and did not marry her, she remained a child in Buyan—a cosseted tsarevna, but not a Tsaritsa, not a native. A human toy. She did not care whether he gave her a ring—he had given her dozens, of every dark and glinting gem—but she did not wish to be a princess forever.

Koschei picked up the knife he had been using to open couriers’ seals and looked up at her speculatively. Reaching up, he slowly sliced off the buttons of her hunting dress.

“If you keep cutting at me I shall have no clothes left,” said Marya Morevna. The gems in her hair clattered against one another as he cupped her skull in one large hand. With the other, he cut away the skirt of her dress in a stroke, like peeling the skin off a red, red apple. His hands burned coldly on her. She felt, as she could always feel, the bones of him beneath the skin of his fingers, his hips. Then he hardened, his skin becoming warm and real and full. A skeleton, always, embraced her first, and then remembered to be a man. She understood—had he not told her? To be Deathless is to treat with death in every moment. To stave death is not involuntary, like breathing, but a constant tension, like balancing a glass on the head. And each day the Tsar of Life fought in his own body to keep death down like a chastened dog.

Koschei dug his nails into the small of Marya’s naked back; blood welled in tiny drops. Marya cried out a little, her breath thin and quick, and he lifted his thumb to his lips, suckling at the little smear of her blood. His cheeks, always gaunt, hung with shadows, and he watched her with a starveling’s eyes. But that did not frighten her anymore. Her lover often looked starved, hounded. She could kiss those things from him, and often did, until his face waxed seraphic, soft, smooth—as anyone can do for her mate when the day is long and hard, and solace far off. She thought nothing of it now, of kissing him alive. Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could. Yes, she thought, magic is like that, when it comes. Like the fountains of blood, the houses of skin and hair, Koschei had long since become home. So Marya smiled as he bit her shoulders, feeling infant bruises bloom invisibly under her skin. Tomorrow I shall wear them like medals, she thought as he lifted her up onto the wreckage of field maps and mechanical diagrams.

“Koschei,” she whispered against his neck, where his dark hair curled. “Where do you keep your death?”

Koschei the Deathless lifted the calves of Marya Morevna around his waist and sank into her with the weight of years. He moaned against her breast. It stopped her breath, how like a child the Tsar of Life became when he needed her. The power she had over him, that he gave her. Who is to rule, that is all.

“Tell me,” she whispered. She wanted that, too. She wanted so much these days, everything she touched.

“Hush, you Delilah!” He thrust against her, the bones of his hips stabbing at her soft belly.

“I keep nothing from you. I befriend your friends; I eat as you eat; I teach you the dialectic! If you will not take me to wife, at least take me into confidence.”

Koschei squeezed his eyes shut. He winced with the force of his secret, his climax, his need. As he gripped her tighter and tighter, Marya thought his face grew rounder, younger, as though breathing in her own youth.

“I keep it in a glass chest,” he gasped finally, pushing her roughly back over the stacks of predicted troop movements, his fists caught up in the infinite mass of her hair. “Guarded by four dogs: a wolf like you, a starved racing hound, a haughty lap pup, and a fat sheepdog. All their names begin with the same letter, and only I know the letter.” He shut his eyes against her cheek as she arched toward him like a drawn bow. “And only someone who knows their names can reach the chest where I keep my death.”

Koschei cried out as though he were dying. He leaned against his love, his chest shaking. She held him, like a baby, like her own. And it did not escape her that speaking of his death excited Koschei somewhere deep inside, as if the proximity of it, even the word itself, sizzled electric in his brain.

“Will we win, Koschei?” she whispered. The room went suddenly frigid, frost gathering at the tall windows. “Will we win this war?”

“War is not for winning, Masha,” sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. “It is for surviving.”

Naganya the vintovnik curled against Marya that night in Marya’s own bedchamber, which was curtained in wine red velvets and silks. Living in Marya’s little room was like living inside a heart. She liked it that way, though it gave Madame Lebedeva a headache. And she liked her privacy, to be among her own things. Her enormous bed, its four black pillars disappearing into the ceiling, sank both girls in pillows and down. Naganya, always warm to the touch, sighed in the shadows, and Marya Morevna held her tight so that Nasha would know she wasn’t angry anymore. Had never really been.

“Tomorrow,” Naganya said, “it would be marvelous to go out into the central square and both of us shoot as far as we can, and then go running to see what we have shot! Once I played that game with a boy, and he shot a frog right through the throat. And the strangest, ugliest thing happened. The frog turned into a girl, and she started crying, all covered with mud and naked.” Naganya paused to allow Marya to be impressed. “She wore a green dress when they married, and made wedding bread like nothing you’d believe. The crust was all full of honey and sugar and hard little candied bilberries. She cried when the banns were read, too. The same tears as that day when he shot her. Perhaps she didn’t want to be married to him, but who would not want to be married to an expert marksman? I cannot believe it. She must have cried for some secret amphibian reason. Then her dress caught on fire while they danced, and there was a mess, but that’s neither here nor there.”

“If we shoot in the city, we may hit someone who is not playing our game,” said Marya sleepily. The small of her back still burned pleasantly from Koschei’s nails.

The vintovnik struck the pillow with her walnut fist. “That’s the fun of it! Ah, well, if you want to be a baby about it, we can go out into the wood. Probably won’t get anything but squirrels, and none of them ever turn into girls.”

“All right, Nasha. And if I get a frog, she’s all yours.”

The imp snuggled closer. “Do you still love me, then, Mashenka?”

“Of course, Nashenka. Punishment doesn’t mean you aren’t loved. On the contrary. You can really only punish someone you love.”

Naganya clicked her ironworks happily.

Marya opened her eyes in the dark, staring up at the carved ceiling, which showed a scene of a great fringed wyrm beset by boyars. “Have I ever told you about the first time Koschei punished me?”

“Koschei punished you?”

“Oh yes, many times. But the first time was because he asked me not to speak, and I spoke anyway. I didn’t say anything much; I just told him I was feeling better. But it wasn’t what I said, it was that I’d broken my word. Even if you think it was cruel of him to tell me not to speak, I had promised.”

Naganya wriggled, fretting. Even though the punishment was long done, she could not help worrying for her friend.

“And so when I first came to Buyan, he did not let me come into the Chernosvyat with him, or have supper, or meet any lovely rifle imps with names like mine. He left me at the stables to look after his horse because I had broken my promise.”

“Well. You could still breathe, I’m sure.” Naganya could not help needling—it was her nature.

“Some things are worse than not breathing,” Marya said softly. “When you are so far from home, and frightened, and have been sick a long time, and no one knows you at all, and you miss your mother and your old house, and you don’t know if you are to be married or killed, to be left in a stable alone without a word is very bad. But I got out the shovel all the same, even though the blade was half as tall as me. I mucked out the horse’s stall—and that beast makes a mess, I can tell you, all manure and exhaust and broken mufflers! After a while I was hardly crying at all, but my arms ached like death. I brushed his coat and rubbed him down with oil, with him snorting and his eyes glowing all the while. He was still white and cream-colored, as he was while I was sick.

“‘Why do you change colors like that?’ I said, not expecting an answer. ‘It makes it hard to choose the right oil!’

“And he rumbled at me, ‘I’m not the horse who fetched you in Petrograd. That is my sister, the Midnight Nag. Then you rode my brother, the Noontide Horse, who is red as sunrise. You and I have only just met. I am the Dawn Gelding, and you must ride all of us to get here. My name is Volchya-Yagoda.’

“‘He named you wolf-food?’ I asked, since I didn’t know Koschei’s humor then.

“Volchya snorted again, and sparks flew out of his nose. ‘Aren’t we all?’ he said.

“I began to brush his horribly tangled mane. Every time I pulled his scalp he nipped me, and Volchya’s nips are like the bites of a sword. I wept a great deal, I recall. And in the cold, even weeping hurts. It comes in jerks and hitches, and your tears half freeze to your face. I didn’t know how to keep from crying then. When I finished, his hair shone red with my blood, and he looked like his brother. Night had gotten fat and black outside, and the city frightened me. Where did Koschei live? Where could I get food? Where could I drink or sleep? So I reshod Volchya, to put off having to decide those things. I pulled off his old tire-tread horseshoes and hammered on fresh iron ones. I knew how to do this, for when I was young and I wore a red scarf, we all had to learn to maintain the policeman’s horses after school. In case of another war, you understand. So I ran my hand along his fetlock—so soft and hot!—and he put his leg right into my hand. When I had finished, Volchya-Yagoda looked at me with those huge, fiery eyes and lay down right there in his clean stall.

“‘Come,’ he said. ‘Sleep by me, and he will fetch you in the morning. Share my water trough and my oat bag.’

“Well, Nasha, I drank and I ate, even though the oats were dry and tasteless. I found a sugar lump in the bag, and Volchya let me have it. I lay down next to his big white belly and shut my eyes. It was like sleeping next to the stove in my old house. Because, Nasha, even when you have been wicked, sometimes there is a warm bed and a warm friend somewhere, if only you know where to look. I learned that from Volchya, though I don’t think it’s precisely what I was meant to learn. And just as I was drifting off to sleep, broken and exhausted and still bleeding a little from a nip or two, Volchya-Yagoda said softly in my ear, ‘Sleep well, Marya Morevna. I think I like you best. None of the other girls gave me new shoes.’”

“And did he come for you in the morning?”

“Oh yes, and all was forgiven. You cannot punish someone unless you wish to forgive them, after all. What would be the point? And I told him what Volchya said.”

“And? What did Papa say?”

“He said, ‘You must have been mistaken. There have never been any other girls.’”

In the dark, Naganya the vintovnik frowned and clicked her tongue against her teeth.

Marya Morevna slept with her fists curled tight, held at the ready, next to her chin.

9 A Girl Not Named Yelena

Madame Lebedeva exhaled a thin, fine curl of smoke from her cigarette, nestled in its ivory holster. She reclined in a plush blue chair, her angular body sheathed in a sleeveless gown of swan feathers, speckled with tiny glass beads. Madame busied herself with flamboyantly not eating her cucumber soup. Bits of chervil and tarragon floated in the green broth, lonely and unattended. Lebedeva leaned in confidentially, but she needn’t have—the crowded cafe produced enough din to hide any secret she cared to share.

“I’m thrilled to my bones to be able to bring you here, Masha, dear.”

Marya thanked her again. Madame Lebedeva had made up her eyes specially for their luncheon, or more precisely, for the komityet that controlled entry to the exclusive magicians’ restaurant. Her lids glittered, frosted with the lightest onion-green powder. She had chosen it to match the soup, which she had decided to order weeks ago. Marya could have eaten in the little chalet whenever she liked, of course, being forbidden nowhere in Buyan. But Lebedeva had earned her privilege, and hand in hand, the pleasure of lording her privilege over her friend. “I’m insensate with rapture, I tell you. It’s all on account of my having produced a cikavac, of course. A trifle, really. For one possessed of such grace as I, to conceal an egg under the arm for forty days and shun the confessional is barely worth mentioning! Such a dear little creature, too. But the reviews! Oh, they have savaged me, Masha!”

“Savaged?”

Lebedeva tapped her cigarette; ash drifted. “Savaged. They said it should have looked like a parakeet, not a ‘ridiculous miniature pelican.’ Apparently, I shouldn’t have cut my nails during the forty days, which is why it understands animal tongues but doesn’t grant wishes. And my selling it to that vodyanoy was an act of blatant mercantilism and I ought to be questioned. Critics, my darling, are never happy unless they are crushing something underfoot. A pelican! I ought to eat his eyes.”

A waiter in a crisp white shirt appeared noiselessly at their side. He bowed with genteel solicitude. “More soup, Madame?” His bald head shone in the lamplight, save for the strip of wild white hair that flowed down the center of his skull like a horse’s mane. Lebedeva’s face blossomed.

“How delightful to meet another vila! One’s countrymen are always a comfort. No, dear.” Madame Lebedeva smiled, her charm perfect, ripe, chill. She had practiced in the mirror for days. “I have a delicate constitution. Marya will certainly have another bowl of your captivating ukha, however! Humans are so robust. Is that sturgeon I smell in the broth?”

“Very perceptive, Madame. And the chef sends his compliments on your production of Tuesday last. Pelicans will surely be all the rage next season.”

Lebedeva scowled. The waiter turned his attention to Marya, his pale eyes moist with anticipation. For her own part, Marya wanted no more fish stew, though it warmed her with a delicate, salty, dill-rich flavor. She was quite full—but she loved to make Madame Lebedeva happy, and what made her happy, chiefly, was ordering others about.

The waiter bent to speak more intimately with them. His skin smelled like frozen pine sap.

“If Comrade Morevna would be interested, I myself have been working on a small glamour she might enjoy. It’s nothing, really,” he demurred before Marya could say anything at all. “But if you like it, perhaps you could whisper a word to the Tsar?”

“I … I’m hardly a judge. I know nothing about the business of magicians.”

“Marya,” whispered Lebedeva, “surely you know how this works. We took extensive notes on our visits to Moscow.”

“Yes, but in Moscow this sort of cafe is for writers.” Lebedeva and the waiter both looked pleasantly perplexed, disliking to be shown up, but gladdened all the same, certain now to receive a lesson from the source. “Writers?” Marya said encouragingly. Speaking to the folk of Buyan was like walking on ice—they could be conversing just as smoothly as you please, and then suddenly Marya would fall through into their alien ideas, shocked at what they did not know. “Novelists? Poets? Playwrights?” Lebedeva sucked on her cigarette, which never seemed to get smaller, no matter how much ash fell from it like snow.

“I’m sure it sounds fascinating, dear. What are they, some sort of conjurers?”

“No, no, they tell stories. Write them down, I mean.” Marya grabbed at her tea to buy a moment’s thought. Buyanites had an insatiable lust for information about the human world, but anything Marya told them became a daring new fashion, spreading like gossip. She had to be careful. “A playwright writes a story that other people act out. They memorize the story and pretend that they are the heroines and villains of it. A poet writes one that rhymes, like a song.” Marya grinned suddenly. She shut her eyes and recited, the words coming back to her like old friends:

There, weeping, a tsarevna lies, locked in a cell.

And Master Grey Wolf serves her very well.

There, in her mortar, sweeping beneath the skies,

the demon Baba Yaga flies.

There Tsar Koschei,

he wastes away,

poring over his pale gold.

The waiter tucked his cloth under an arm and applauded vigorously. Lebedeva clapped her hands. “Oh, superb! It’s about us! How gratifying to be so recognized.”

Encouraged, Marya hurried on. “A novelist writes a long kind of story, with … a lot of smaller stories in it, and motifs, and symbols, and sometimes things in the story really happened, and sometimes they didn’t.”

The waiter wrinkled his lovely nose. “Why would you tell a story about something that didn’t really happen? At least the poetry was straightforward, manful. Not concerned with idle fancies, just a respectable census report!”

Marya slurped at her soup thoughtfully. “I suppose because it’s boring to keep telling stories where people just get born and grow up and get married and die. So they add strange things in, to make it more interesting when a person is born, more satisfying when they get married, sadder when they die.”

Lebedeva snapped her fingers. “It’s like lying!” she exclaimed. “Well, we understand that, of course! The bigger the lie, the happier the liar.”

“Yes, a little like lying. But…” Marya leaned in close to them conspiratorially. She couldn’t help it—she enjoyed being an expert, an acknowledged authority. Watching her opinions become fact. And as she lived and ate and slept in Buyan, she learned better to explain things so that her comrades could understand them. “But you know, a wizard with black hair and a thick mustache put a curse on Moscow, and Petrograd, too, so that no one would be able to tell the truth without lying. If a novelist wrote a true story about how things really happened, no one would believe him, and he might even be punished for spreading propaganda. But if he wrote a book full of lies about things that could never really happen, with only a few true things hidden in it, well, he would be hailed as a hero of the People, given a seat at a writers’ cafe, served wine and ukha, and not have to pay for any of it. He’d get a salaried summer on the dacha, and be feted. Even given a medal by the wizard with the thick mustache.”

The waiter whistled. “That’s a good curse. I should like to shake that wizard’s hand and buy him a vodka or two.”

“Someone ought to write a novel about me,” said Lebedeva loftily. “I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide a poor liar.”

“For a while,” said Marya Morevna, “I thought I might like to be a writer. I walked to school in the mornings and read poetry and wondered if I could be like the men and women in the reserved tea shops. If there was a story in me, somewhere deep, sleeping, waiting to wake up.”

“I doubt it.” Madame Lebedeva sniffed. “Your lying really needs work. Perhaps it’s because you’re so far from Petrograd. Curses haven’t much sticking power, geographically speaking. Honesty is such a nasty habit, dear. Like biting your nails.”

Just then, the round window of the cafe, fashioned from the lens of a whale’s eye, shook with a quiet tremor.

“It’s possible you chose an unfortunate poem to recite, my love,” said Madame Lebedeva, finally allowing herself a single, decadent slurp of her pale green soup. Her eyes slid closed in exquisite satisfaction. The waiter hurried off, suddenly quite interested in a table far across the room.

Outside, a black car approached. Its long nose sloped and curved like a merciless beak; its fenders hunched up as round as eggs. Like clever eyes, the windows narrowed. It was both like and unlike Volchya-Yagoda, the car who had borne Marya to Buyan. This one seemed wholly larger, more careful, more luxurious, more serious.

Below it, four yellow chicken legs loped gracefully on the road where wheels ought to have been, their black claws scrabbling at the hard snow.

Setting her silver spoon aside, Madame Lebedeva extinguished her cigarette on her plate, then retrieved it with a flourish, whole and unsmoked, tucking it into her hat.

“Much as you know I adore you, devotchka, there is about to be far too much excitement in here for my poor little heart. I believe I shall adjourn myself to the cigar room and snuffle out their oldest yaks blood. To settle my stomach.”

Lebedeva left in a flurry of feathers and pale, swinging hair—she did everything in a flurry. Marya Morevna blinked twice and glanced nervously at the car again, its chicken legs shuffling back and forth on the icy cobbles. Her own stomach quavered—her body had learned to feel it deep in the guts when something strange was about to happen. This was useful, but uncomfortable. Marya kept her hands steady.

The cafe fell abruptly silent—a complete, profound silence, with no tinkle of plate or dropped cup to blemish it. The skin of the walls prickled in gooseflesh as a broad-breasted woman with a nose like an axe blade strode into the place, her throat swallowed up in a black fur coat, her white hair strangled back into a savagely tight chignon. She looked to her left, then her right; then her eyes fell on Marya Morevna like an old, fat crow settling on a branch. She seated herself with the confidence of a landlord; three waiters hurried to bring her tea, vodka, golden kvass in a fresh jar. A fourth appeared, a rusalka, his hair dripping wet, bearing a whole goose on a golden tray. The woman tore off a leg and bit into it, licking the juice from her slightly fuzzy chin. The waiter was obliged to stand, a piece of furniture hoisting the goose for her further enjoyment.

“So you’re her,” growled the old woman, grinning with her mouth full. She had all her teeth, and they were sharp, leonine, yellow.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” said Marya Morevna softly. The old woman crackled with potency; Marya’s stomach felt it like a blow. The crone tapped the table with the goose’s leg bone.

“Kid, let’s skip this pantomime where you pretend you’re not rutting with my brother up in that gauche tower of his—come off it! Does everything have to be black? He’s an affected old bull, I’ll tell you that for free. Anyway, I have no patience for innocent girls, unless they have apples in their mouths and are on speaking terms with my soup pot.”

Marya tried to smile politely, as though they were having a pleasant conversation about the weather. But she gripped her teacup so tight the handle left red moon-shapes in her palms. Her face flushed and the old woman rolled her jaundiced eyes.

“Oh, quit that, Yelena! Blushing is for virgins and Christians!”

“My name is not Yelena.”

The old woman paused and crooked one eyebrow, whose scraggly hairs had grown so long she’d braided them neatly along her brow bone. Her voice changed timbre, rising to an interested tenor. “Forgive me. I just assumed. My brother has a”—she stirred her tea with the fatty end of the goose bone—“fetish for girls named Yelena, you see. Almost a monomania. Occasionally, a Vasilisa will sneak in there, just to keep things spiced. So it’s an easy mistake. What is your name, my child?”

“Marya Morevna. And there aren’t any others. There have never been.”

The crone tossed her goose bone over one shoulder. The waiter, still silent and dutiful behind her, caught it with a deft hand. She leaned over the table, her fur coat sloshing into the vodka, and plunked her face down in her hands.

“Well, isn’t that just fascinating,” she breathed. “The devil take lunch! Let your old baba take you on an … expedition. It’ll be good for you! Morally fortifying, like having a good stare at a graveyard. A body needs a good memento mori to flush out the humors.”

The crone seized Marya Morevna by the arm and shoved her out of the restaurant. She paid for nothing.

Marya was no fool. She could add two and two and two and come up with six—which is to say, add old grandmother and chicken legs and terrified waitstaff and come up with Baba Yaga. No magician outranked Baba Yaga. Her seat at the magicians’ cafe was sacrosanct, to say the least.

Outside, snow floated down a lacy path, so thick it obscured even the Chernosvyat, hunched dark and impregnable on the hill. Baba Yaga gave a bleating cry and leapt up into the air, her skinny legs scissoring beneath her. She landed hard on Marya’s shoulders, digging her heels into the girl’s armpits.

“Mush, girl! Mush!” she yelped. “A wife must be a good mount, eh?”

Marya’s knees trembled, but when she felt the snap of a goat-hide whip on her back, she stumbled ahead, running through the snow. Baba Yaga’s car snorted to life and hopped along behind her, nipping at her heels with its front bumper.

“That way, not-Yelena!” Baba Yaga hollered into the storm. Marya groaned like an old nag, and ran.

Marya’s mouth dripped saliva like an overworked horse. She rounded the snow-swept corner into a half-sheltered alley, her breathing shallow, rough, and fast. Baba Yaga hauled on her hair to stop her at the threshold of the door and vaulted off. Marya gasped with relief, the hot weight finally vanished from her back. She bent over, her heart wheezing, sweat pouring off of her, crawling in her scalp. A horse-bone door cut into the side of a blood-brown boar-skin building. Rubbish and smashed glass carpeted the thin street. The car honked happily, shuffling its chicken legs.

“In you go, and in I go,” chuffed Baba Yaga, her breath fogging. “And stay close—I want to see if you cry.”

They shouldered through the horse-femur door together. It towered over them both. Within, a yawning factory floor opened up below an iron balcony. They peered over the railing, the screws and bolts groaning with the leaden weight of Baba Yaga. Below, dozens upon dozens of girls worked away at looms the size of army trucks, their fingers flashing in and out of strands of linen, their shuttles racing their hands. Most of the women were blond, their hair braided in a tidy crown around their heads. Only a few dark ones, like Marya, dotted the sea of pale gold. They wore identical blackberry-colored uniforms. The old woman beamed like a holiday morning.

“Every one of those pretty little things is named Yelena. Oh—I’m sorry. That one is Vasilisa. And that one. And that plump one in the corner … and the tall one with her dolly still in her pocket. How sweet.”

Marya wiped her sodden brow. Her calves burned thickly. “What are they doing?” she panted.

“Oh, this is a wartime facility. Didn’t you know? Doesn’t your lover tell you just everything? They’re weaving armies. Noon and midnight, and no days off for good behavior. See? There, one is coming off the line just now.”

Directly below them, one of the looms and one of the Yelenas were finishing off the helmet on a soldier. He was as flat as paper, but perfect, his uniform crisp, his eyes serenely shut, his rifle at the ready. The shuttle scooted back and forth, weaving in the last of his helmet’s spike. When it was done, the Yelena opened up the leg of his trousers and blew hard into it, first the right, then the left. The soldier inflated, his nose popping into shape, muscles plumping in his thighs. He sat up stiffly and, with much creaking of new stitches, marched to the rear of the room, where the blocking baths awaited.

“They’re not alive, see,” explained Baba Yaga. “Well, not properly alive. Not alive like a frog or my car. It’s all so Viy can’t pull his old trick of killing our folk like he’s getting paid per pint, then turning around and lining them up in his own formations. When you stab one of these poor bastards, they just unravel. Good trick, yes? Can’t say my brother’s not clever.”

“Comrade Yaga—”

Baba Yaga whirled on her, the tails of her fur coat whipping around. “Don’t you call me comrade, little girl. We aren’t equals and we aren’t friends. Chairman Yaga. That comrade nonsense is just a hook by which the low pull down the high. And then what do you get? Everyone rolling around in the same shit, like pigs.”

Marya fought to keep her voice strong and deep. She would not show fear in front of this wolf of a woman. “Chairman Yaga. Why did you bring me here?”

Baba Yaga grinned, showing all her teeth. Her black fur coat had heads on it, Marya suddenly noticed, three of them—slit-eyed minks, their muzzles frozen in a triplicate of snarling. “To show you your future, Comrade Morevna! Koschei, my insatiable brother, abducted all those girls—from Moscow, from Petrograd, from Novgorod, from Minsk. Spirited them from their cozy little homes, barreled them through the snow, telling them what to eat, how to kiss, when to speak, bathing them when they fell sick, just so they’d love him and need him—oh, my brother does yearn to be needed! He needs so much himself, you see. And then, well, what always happens with husbands? A few of them he got bored of; some of them betrayed him, stealing his death or running off with preverbal bogatyrs with necks like hams. And then they steal his death. Oh, the vixens! They were shameless. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. My brother always ends up dead in the end. Oh, the funerals I’ve had to attend! And flowers and gifts for each of them! I’m half-bankrupt with his theatrics. It never takes, though. That’s what deathless means. It’s only his death that dies. Koschei goes on and on. None of those milk-assed girls down there understood it, even though he practically wears a letter of intent on his chest. They snatch up his death and break it open and stomp on it like the curs they are, but what can you do? A dog is a dog. She only knows how to bite and eat. But most of them, Marya—my, what a black, soft name! I could lie in it all day—most of them couldn’t get by me to begin with. Family is a thorny, vicious business, and Koschei can’t marry without my say-so. Those stupid ox-wives weren’t fit to sweep my floor! They couldn’t even fire an arrow through the eye of a needle! What good is a wife who can’t, I ask you? I’ve done him a thousand favors.” Baba Yaga reached into her coat and pulled out a cigarillo. She chomped on its end and spat, rolling it over between her lips. “So there they sit. They don’t get any older—the elderly make terrible workers, I ought to know. Never like to do half a day’s work when I can do none, myself. And they don’t die. That Yelena there—with the mole on her neck!—she’s been here, oh, since the days of Knyaz Oleg. Lenochka!” Chairman Yaga called down, and blew the seamstress a smoky kiss. The girl did not look up from the rifle she wove. “I’m sure we’ve got room in here for you somewhere, Marya! After all, what kind of babushka would I be if I left even one of my babies out in the cold?”

Marya’s eyes blurred with tears. She felt dizzy; another step and she’d topple over the edge of the balcony. All of them? All of them had loved Koschei, slept in his huts? Snuggled with vintovniks? Learned to be cold?

“He said there were no others, not ever. He said I misheard Volchya-Yagoda, and I was his only love.” But more than the lie she had been told, Marya’s heart could not absorb the ugliness of her lover keeping these girls prisoner, year after year, like a treasure hoard.

“Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I’ve eaten my share. That’s lesson number one. Lesson number two: among the topics about which a husband is most likely to lie are money, drink, black eyes, political affiliation, and women who squatted on his lap before and after your sweet self.”

Marya covered her face in her hands. She could not bear to look at the Yelenas and Vasilisas. To think of them wrapped up in mustard plasters, or opening their mouths to receive bread and roe. And worse, never going home, never looking up from work that could never, never be done.

“Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven’t you ever heard a story about Koschei? He’s only got the one. Act One, Scene One: pretty girl. Act One, Scene Two: pretty girl gone!”

“I didn’t think it meant anything.” I thought the stories were about me, somehow. That I was a heroine. That the magic was for me. “They don’t even know what writers are, here!”

Baba Yaga softened, as much as she could soften. Her braided eyebrows creased together gently. “Doesn’t mean we don’t know what stories are. Doesn’t mean we don’t walk in them, every second. Chyerti—that’s us, demons and devils, small and big—are compulsive. We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They’re comforting. Sometimes little things change—a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it’s no different, not really. Not ever.” Baba Yaga pressed the back of her withered hand to Marya’s cheek. “That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”

Marya’s tears trickled off her cheeks and dripped through the iron balcony grate. One splashed upon a Vasilisa’s red hair. She did not move, even a little. Oh, I will do something, something, Marya thought with a fury like a fever. When I am Tsaritsa I will break all these machines and I will set them free. “If you’re here to decide if I can marry, why have you waited so long? I’ve been here nearly a year. I’ve believed him for a year!”

Baba Yaga withdrew her hand. Stamping out her cigarillo on the balcony rail, she straightened her back.

“Lenin died,” she said curtly. “He’s better at it than my brother. His death stuck to him. What should I have done? I went to dance on his coffin. I owed him at least that. No one saw me, of course. After all these years, I’m nimble enough to step under the wind. The horns played and the dirges sang and I danced on his ugly glass coffin—like Snow White, the bald devil! I wonder, if I kissed him, would he wake up?”

“I could have an order made up, if you like,” said Chairman Yaga, marching back down Skorohodnaya Road on her own steam. She stopped short, sniffing the air with long, snorting breaths like a hound. Baba Yaga snuck around the side of a darkened, quiet distillery. “Aha! Thought you could hide, did you?” she cried, kicking a massive storage barrel of new vodka. Snow crusted its iron bands. She petted it fondly. “I have a nice brass stamp, big enough to bash heads. But I believe it’s all more or less standard. Three tasks, completed on schedule, and you can put on a nice white dress and blush to your heart’s content. Well, I doubt he’ll let you wear white. But you get the idea. And if you fail, I get to crunch your green bones between my teeth—snick, snick!”

“I thought you punished girls by putting them to work in that factory.”

Baba Yaga tapped at the vodka barrel like a safecracker. “That’s the privilege of a Yelena. You, I want to eat. Family shares alike, you know. My brother gets to taste you. Why should I be left out? You’ve been eating like a tsarevna for a year! Look at those buttocks, those meaty arms! I could get a Lenten feast out of you, and half a New Year roast.”

Marya Morevna stood in the cold, hands shoved deep in her woolen pockets. The wind buffeted her fur hat. “Isn’t it the groom who’s supposed to get firebird feathers and rings from the bottom of the sea to prove his worthiness to the bride?”

Baba Yaga laid her head on its side, as if considering which answer would be most amusing. “Women must cast off the chains of oppression, my little suckling calf. Besides, that sort of thing really only works if you don’t let the groom have his way with your womb for a year before the wedding. Once you do, you can’t get grooms to carry out the hearth-ash, let alone mess about with firebirds. Appalling creatures, if you ask me. Nervous bags of burning excrement—and have you ever seen one eat? You’ll get nothing but blisters and a kick in the mouth for the trouble. And that goes for husbands and firebirds both.”

Marya allowed herself a smug smile. She hadn’t a scratch from her firebird.

“But the Yelenas,” she whispered. “I can’t bear to think of them. There must be a mistake. I have to talk to him. I have to—” Maybe it was all nothing, or the old witch was lying just to upset her, and she would laugh with Koschei about it in the morning.

“What, hear him explain? Grovel? I can understand wanting him to crawl. I’m sure he’s made you do enough of that, and what have you done to deserve it? Had pretty breasts and memorized a bit of poetry? Listen, devotchka. A baba knows. Just tell yourself a story that’ll satisfy you and pretend he told it. Save you a bowlful of trouble.”

“I thought you didn’t want him to marry.”

“I don’t give two teats whether he marries or not. But I won’t tolerate his bringing hang-jaw, lackwit brats into the family.” Chairman Yaga crooked her finger at the oak vat. Her long, warped fingernail sparked as she cut a tiny, neat hole in the side of the thing, then tipped her head to slurp the vodka spurting out. Liquor splashed onto her dry tongue as she lapped and slurped away. Finally, the crone wiped her mouth with her sleeve and traced her finger the other way, sewing up the hole. “And you have to admit, I’ve a devil of a habit for being right. Which of those brats didn’t pounce on the first potato-gobbling cretin that passed her way? Which of them didn’t plot against Koschei? He’s been hurt, my brother, so often. I only want what’s best for him. Tell yourself that, if it helps you smile when he kisses you. And you’d better smile. I’ve been married seventeen times, Marya Morevna. Do you have any idea how much I know about men? And women! Don’t look so shocked—after an eon or two of being a wife you’ll want one of your own, too. Fiendishly convenient things, wives. Better than cows. They’ll love you for beating them, and work ’til they die.”

“I’m not like that.”

“We’ll see. Anyway, what I know about marriage could fill the sky on a starless night. I don’t get to give the tests because I buttered up the right kommissar. I give them because I know. A wife must terrify, she must have a stronger arm than a boyar, and she must know how to rule. That’s all that matters, in the end. Who is to rule. And if you can’t, tscha! You’ve no business with a ring.”

Marya lifted her chin. “And if I don’t want one?”

“You wanted one this morning. What’s changed? That he had a herd of girlfriends before you? Surely you didn’t think deathless meant dickless. Those are nice girls! Hoarding virginity is a criminal act, like hoarding food. Besides, don’t forget the part where I eat your bones if you fail. Better married than rendered into girl-broth and maiden-cutlets.”

10 The Raskovnik

“What’s it look like?” said Naganya, polishing her long walnut legs with viscous oil. She poured the golden stuff onto her skin and giggled as it tickled, trickling into the gunmetal works in the hollows of her knees. She adjusted the bony sighting over her right eye.

“How should I know? I’ve never heard of it.” Masha threw herself disconsolately onto the little velvet chair perched near her cosmetics table. The sun knocked at the windows, turning the red curtains into flames. She never used the cosmetics, though Lebedeva was forever coaxing her to learn the arcane rites of powder and rouge crème. Still, they were there, in small black pots like fell unguents, untouched, but waiting.

Naganya shrugged. “Oh, well, I’ve heard of it. Some hairy little herb that unlocks all locks, supposedly. But that’s not the fun part. The sport of it is, you find raskovnik by locking an old lady up in iron leg shackles and making her walk across a field at the dark of the moon. Wherever her chains fall off—poof! Raskovnik. Never seen the stuff, though. It’s murder to keep fresh—lilies last longer in a vase full of dust.”

“I have to bring it to Chairman Yaga by tomorrow, or she’ll have me in her soup pot. She’s already looking through her cabinets for recipes.” Chairman Yaga had made sure she could not see Koschei, kept him busy and closeted, so that she could do nothing but obey the vicious, ancient witch’s whims. “Do you think we could get Lebedeva to do it? She’s a bit old.”

The vintovnik laughed, the greased metal of her jaw clicking like a gun firing on empty rounds. “I shall tell her you said so next time she pinches my cheeks and fusses with my hair. No good, though: has to be an old human lady. Scarcity drives desire, you know. We haven’t had any proper old grandmothers here in a kingfisher’s year.”

“Then what am I to do? I don’t want to be soup.” And if I cannot get the crown, I cannot get the Yelenas free.

“And you want to marry Koschei. To be worthy.”

Marya Morevna frowned into her chest. “I should go thrash those dogs of his and toss his death off a cliff, that’s what I should do. Nasha, you didn’t see those women! He ought to be scrambling to prove he’s worthy of me!”

Nasha squirmed. Her great dark eyes creased with worry. “But I did see them. I did. When they lived in this room. When they met Chairman Yaga. And I met the other men, too.”

“What other men?”

“The Ivans. Wherever there is a Yelena or a Vasilisa, there is an Ivan. Surely Babushka told you. About the bogatyrs? They aren’t too bright, usually, but bless me if they aren’t a handsome species. They’re always the youngest of three sons. They’re always the honest type, dumb as toenails but big in the trousers. And the Yelenas, they always fall in love and run off. I remember one Ivan came with a wolf, a huge grey monster of a beast. The wolf did all the work, tricking Koschei into telling them where his death was, telling Ivan what to say so that Yelena the Bright would swoon in her seat for him, even though he was a youngest son with no inheritance and mud under his nails. The two of them rode off astride the wolf when it was all said and done. They left Koschei bleeding in the snow. When they’d safely gone, he picked himself up and washed the blood off. He stood watching the road for a long time, like he thought she might come back. But what can you do? Gone means gone. He didn’t come out of the Chernosvyat for weeks. Chairman Yaga won’t even say the name Ivan anymore, she hates them so. If she meets one on the street—snick, snick! She eats him up on the spot, and belches like a grain commissioner, so everyone will know she isn’t sorry.”

“You knew them? You slept curled up with them and you know where they are? But you don’t try to rescue them?”

Naganya scowled. “Chyerti don’t go in for rescuing. If you eat rotten fish, you’re bound to get sick. If you’re a faithless spittoon of a woman, you end up in the factory. It’s only common sense. And besides, people being miserable is natural. Just like it’s natural for an imp to enjoy them being miserable. As a system, it works terrifically well.”

Marya picked at her nails. She knew the answer before she said it. “And if I end up there, you won’t come for me, either?”

Naganya the vintovnik looked away, her oily hair falling into her face.

“Well,” said Marya softly. “If I ever meet a man named Ivan I shall eat his heart before he can wish me a good morning.”

Nasha grinned, eager to skate over such uncomfortable subjects. “That’s on account of how you’re one of us, Mashenka! Spleen and sleeping, marrow and mind. Now, there’s raskovnik to dig up, and not much time.”

“If we need a human, how can we ever get back to a city without Volchya-Yagoda and an armful of weeks to spare?”

“There’s border places. Places where the birches are thinner than paper, and you can tear through. Places where the Tsar of Life and the Tsar of Death fought so hard that their territories lie crushed right up to each other, on either side of a pebble, in the leaves and root of a turnip, on a cat’s tail and his tongue.”

“I should try to see him again, before we go. Baba Yaga can’t keep me out if he hears my voice. Surely he will wrap me up in his arms and tell me—”

“Don’t, Masha.” Naganya fidgeted. “The war is going badly.”

“The war is always going badly.”

Marya and Naganya took a young horse, green and fleet and hungry, and trotted down Skorohodnaya Road in the evening light, the vintovnik tucked in front of Marya herself, clutching the saddle horn with her wooden hands. Twilight drifted lazily, taking its time bringing down a violet-pink haze. The last rays of sun winked on their stallion’s ears.

“I make horses nervous,” Naganya fretted. The safety in her cheek cocked and uncocked sharply, echoing down the road. “Surely this one will rear and drop me! And then roll over on top of us both!”

“I chose a young one, who has not yet heard that you sometimes shoot people. It will be all right.” The horse snorted; snow bleated from his nose.

Naganya twisted in her seat as the road dwindled behind them and the wood rose up, dark and excited, icy and rustling. She grabbed her friend by the chin. “Marya, listen like your ears are bottomless! Border places are dangerous. Very disreputable things live there. You must be careful or Koschei will smelt me for losing you. If you see anyone you know, or someone with a silver star on their breast, you mustn’t talk to them, not even to curse them or ask their names. You mustn’t get off the horse. If your foot touches the ground, I won’t be able to help you. Even the enemy’s pebbles bite and are fierce. I shall find the old lady for you. I shall push her across the field.”

“Isn’t that cheating?”

“Tfu! She expects you to cheat! Masha, whom I love: These tasks do not test your strength or your wiliness; they test your ability to cheat, which is the truest measure of a devil. They are designed to be impossible if you play fair. What should you do instead? Walk into no-man’s-land unprotected and be lost forever?”

“Is that what the others did? Did you tell the Yelenas these things?”

“Yes! And they refused to listen because they were innocent maidens without a lie in their hearts or a smear on their souls. Don’t be innocent, Marya. Innocent means stupid. Follow your friend, who is a goblin and knows better, and we’ll have raskovnik salad before dawn.”

But if I am not innocent, are there lies in my heart? Smears on my soul? Am I a devil? What does it mean, to be one of them? Marya resolved to sort it all out when she had a moment to think through it, when Baba Yaga’s soup pot was not dangling over her head.

The forest deepened, the birches filling with crows, the underbrush with red, pointed hedgehog eyes. Overhead, violet seeped out of the sky and black crept up until only the sharp, cutting stars sliced through the night. Naganya’s body warmed against her own; she worked the trigger in her throat gently to keep her oils from freezing. Finally, the wood opened up into a wide glade where the snow flowed even and smooth as water. A dozen houses glowed and smoked and did the sorts of things village houses do in the dark of winter. Naganya whooped, her cry echoing through the owls like one of their own. An old woman crept out of one of the smallest houses and into the snow. Once she had passed the ring of light cast by all those windows, she squatted in the field, the hissing of her urine loud in the silent evening.

“We’ve luck like a mushroom hunter tonight, Marya! Look at her, all fat and full of juice!” Naganya hopped lightly off the horse, neither sinking in the snow nor leaving tracks, but dancing on it like a mayfly on a lake.

“Why is it safe for you and not for me?” whispered Marya Morevna.

“Because you’re still a girl.” The vintovnik grinned. “Girls have to obey rules. Chyerti break them.”

The rifle imp scampered off through the snow. Marya nudged her horse along to keep her friend in sight.

“Pssst, babushka!” Nasha hissed. “Old lazy slattern! How many babies have you got off your man, hm? Spend your life with your legs open, do you? Just leaves room for the devil to slip in!”

The old woman started and looked around her—right at Naganya—but saw nothing.

“Shame on you, baba! Haven’t even got the decency to get up to witchcraft in your old age! Just lie about, why don’t you? Screech at brats got from half your neighbors. Plump my pillows! Feed me cherries!”

The old woman shivered, peering hard into the dark.

“Babushka! Put your ankles together for once! What if Christ comes back tonight and the first things he sees are your saggy old bones pissing in the snow like a horse? Straight back to paradise with him, on the double quick, that’s what!”

The woman leapt up, drawing her knees together with a dry knocking sound. Naganya dove down and clapped her irons on the old lady’s legs, giggling.

“Marya,” came a soft voice. But Marya reminded herself not to speak to anyone, and stared straight ahead.

“March, Comrade Lazybones!” cried the vintovnik. She boxed one of her own ears, stamped her foot, and shot three bullets out of her mouth with the soft psht psht psht of a silencer. The shots landed all around the old grandmother but did not hurt her, only made her leap forward like a spooked cow. “Faster! Faster! The police are after you! Run! You remember how to hike up your skirts!”

The woman bawled and stumbled, her ankles tangling up in the manacles. “Don’t fall or I shall have you arrested for wasting your life on babies and borscht!”

“Marya,” said the voice again. Marya squeezed her eyes shut. I will not answer, she thought frantically.

Naganya nipped at her human’s heels, spitting silenced bullets and whacking at her toes with bayonets Marya had not known she hid under her arms.

“Don’t cry, you wrinkly old camel! Just think of the stories you’ll have to tell all the other spitting beasts! The devil chased you through the snow! You’ll be Queen Camel, prize pisser!”

“Marya Morevna, look at me.”

Marya could not help it. She looked down. A beautiful young woman stood below her horse, her blond hair gathered up in an elegant ballerina’s bun. She wore a thick white fur coat, the kind a man gives to his mistress. On her chest glimmered a splattering of light, as though someone had thrown a bucket of molten silver onto her. It glowed like a watery star.

“Svetlana Tikhonovna!” Marya gasped.

“Yes, it is me,” the woman said. “Come down and hug me, my darling. I was one-twelfth your mother, after all.”

Svetlana held out her arms. The star on her breast rippled.

“I’m not supposed to.” But she felt her eyes burning with tears. She had not known how much she wished to see a human face, a motherly face.

“The Marya I know didn’t care much for supposed to. You stole my hairbrush, after all, and ran off in the middle of the night like an ungrateful brat. But I give without bitterness, as a mother should.”

“How can you be here, Svetlana? This is the other side of the world.” Marya’s fingers ached to brush her icy cheek, to say, What of my birth mother? What of my father? Any word of my sisters? And I am not a brat.

“So true, so true! Well, the tale of it is, I died a few months after you left. I couldn’t help it, I was so hungry. When the police came to question my husband about his club memberships, I spat at them and told them they ought to be shamed, to be so fat, in their big apartments, while my babies and I didn’t remember what meat tasted like! You can’t say that sort of thing. I knew that. I think I was just tired of being alive. It’s no good, these days, being alive.”

“I like it,” whispered Marya.

“That’s because you don’t live in Leningrad. Can you believe it? It’s Leningrad now that the old dragon is dead. They keep changing the name. Mark me, in twenty years they’ll call it Lemon Popsicle and shoot people who laugh when they say it. Life is nice when there’s cucumber soup and eye powder the color of scallions and a samovar piping away on every table. I forgot how nice, until I came to the Country of Death, where Viy is Tsar and the ghosts of the meals the living eat make all our larders groan. Come down, Masha. I’ll give you a candy.”

“I’m afraid. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be hungry. I don’t want to be ordinary and ignored. And I certainly don’t want to be dead. My home is in Buyan, in the Country of Life.”

“Your home is Leningrad,” Svetlana Tikhonovna snarled. “You’ve only forgotten it.”

“I haven’t! But you can leave your home and find someplace new. People do it all the time. Why can’t I?”

Svetlana Tikhonovna shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her in the least. “Come and kiss my cheeks, devotchka, and I will tell you how beautiful you’ve grown up to be. What have the living to fear from the dead?”

Naganya whooped from the far corner of the field, where the woman had stopped, her manacles springing off with a clang. The old grandmother set off at a dead run back to her house, and the vintovnik danced, the shackles jangling in her hand.

Marya shook her head. She felt as if a silver fog clung to her head, making her dull and drowsy. “Svieta, you do not mean to kiss me, really.”

Svetlana Tikhonovna cackled and leapt at her, clawing and grasping at her leg. Folk spiraled up out of the snow like smoke, men and women and children, all with the silver splatter of death on their chests, all hungry and showing their teeth.

“Come down, come down!” they wept. “We only want to love you, and embrace you! You are so warm! Why should our enemy have all your kisses?”

A hundred cold fingers pulled at Marya, and no rider can stay on their horse with such hands on their skin. She toppled and fell into the mass of them, snow and vapor puffing up around her. As one they fell on her, weeping all the while. They did not bite her or claw her, but kissed her, over and over, their lips on her flesh. With every kiss she felt colder and colder, thinner and thinner, as though the night wind might blow her away. Svetlana Tikhonovna lay against her, her full, frosted lips closing over the mouth of Marya Morevna.

“Come down,” the ballerina whispered in her frigid ear. “I will teach you to dance so perfectly as to stop a hundred hearts with every step.”

Marya moaned beneath the shades. She tried to think, to fill her heart with living, hot things, to remember that she was alive and not sunk in the earth under the weight of all these ghosts.

“Tea,” she whispered faintly. “Raspberry jam still in the pot, ovens, soup with dill, pickle broth.” The shades recoiled, their teeth reflecting moonlight, silver and flat. Marya struggled to lift her head. “Peppers on my plate and running in the cold and dumplings boiling in an iron pot and Lebedeva’s powders and Zemya’s curse words and gusli playing as fast as fingers can pluck!” she continued, her voice stronger, lower, almost growling. The ghosts glowered resentfully at her.

Svetlana Tikhonovna grimaced.

“You were always a vicious child,” she spat.

“A firebird in my net! A rifle in my fist! Mustard plasters and birch switches and blini crisping in my pan!” she screamed, and the citizens of Viy’s country threw up their hands, wandering back into the forest.

Marya shakily pulled herself back onto the young horse, who, to his credit, had not spooked or run, but munched on weeds buried in the snow and thought nothing of the whole business. Naganya stood on the other side of his barrel flank, squinting up at Marya.

“Don’t be too pleased with yourself,” she said. “Imagine! You could have just listened to me in the first place—how novel that would have been! A first, in the annals of Buyan!”

Naganya held up her dark hand. In her palm was a flower, its blazing orange petals as thick as cow tongues, covered with bristling white fur, its leaves sharp and shredded, its stem studded with wicked thorns.

“Remember this when you are queen,” said the vintovnik solemnly. “That I went into the dark for you, and scared an old woman half to death.”

Chairman Yaga sat at her monumental desk in the rear of the magicians’ cafe, its wood black and glossy as enamel. She turned over the raskovnik in her hands, peering at it with a jeweler’s glass.

“Well, it’s a runt,” she conceded.

“You didn’t ask for a bouquet,” Marya snapped. Dark circles rimmed her eyes; her fingers had gone pale and bloodless. Every inch of her ached, worn out, run down, exhausted.

“True, true. I’ll remember that, for the next girl.”

Marya said nothing, staring straight ahead, but her cheeks burned.

“What have we said about blushing, devotchka?” Baba Yaga pinched her thick nose. “Goats and gangrene, girl, I can’t stand the smell of your youth!”

“Wait a while. It’ll go away.”

“Oh ho! Now we’re sniping at our betters, are we? Listen, soon-to-be-soup. In marriage, the highest virtue is humility. If you’re humble, they’ll never see you coming!” Baba Yaga slapped the table to emphasize her point. As if by coincidence her fingers found a glass of vodka there, and she knocked it back in a gulp. “Whenever I get married, I always wear a caul ripped off of twin calves. Makes me young, makes me beautiful like a dollop of butter, makes me blush and tug my braids and pray in churches and bow down, humble as manure. The boys can’t resist it! They come panting with their cocks on a silk leash, their balls painted gold for my pleasure. I give them a night on my knees, just like they like, sweet and obedient and dumb as a thumbnail, confused by their mysterious bodies, oh my, so much stronger than mine! Then they wake up and—ha! There is Baba Yaga in their beds, extra warts, teeth like spikes, and the soup pot already red on the hearth. It’s a good trick. You should see their faces!”

“I’m not like that.”

“We’ll see. There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.”

11 White Gold, Black Gold

“You see why I need you,” said Marya Morevna, sitting down on the forest moss next to Zemlehyed, who, for his part, seemed uninterested, burrowing his attention instead in a crown of violets and plump rosehips he had braided together. He held out his thumb and squinted at it, his stony tongue sticking out of his mouth with the ferocity of his concentration. Finally, he threaded three scarlet nightshade mushrooms into the crown and squinted at it again.

“Don’t,” he said brusquely.

“Zmey Gorinich,” she repeated. “That’s a dragon. Quite a step up from shrubbery. I haven’t the first idea how to fight a dragon, let alone get his treasure to Chairman Yaga while I stay Marya Morevna, daughter of twelve mothers, and not Roasted, daughter of Scorched. She wants his white gold and his black gold—and to be honest, I want nothing. I want to sleep.”

“Snipe him,” gruffed Zemlehyed. “Rat-a-tat, between his eyes. Chew dragon-steak, be happy. Bother Naganya.” The leshy peeled a strip of birch bark from a nearby tree and twined it deftly through the violets—more deftly than Marya ever thought his thick, bark-covered hands could manage.

“Are you angry with me, Zemya?”

The leshy cracked an acorn between his granite teeth and spat the cap into the grass.

Marya tried again. “Naganya isn’t half strong enough to wrestle a dragon, and shooting him seems convenient, except that killing such a beast would hand Viy an aerial bombing platform. With three heads.”

“Strong enough. She slumbers near to you.”

Marya looked down at the moss. Ants wandered toward some distant battle or wheat-seed orgy. Leshiyi were so delicate in their etiquette. She doubted he cared who slept in her bed—leshiyi mated by cross-pollination. He cared, she guessed, because he believed that the strongest of them should guard Marya in her sleep, and Marya had chosen Naganya because she held the—clearly mistaken—belief that the vintovnik could beat him, if it came to fists and grappling. Zemlehyed pouted and tucked a sprig of bright rowan berries into the crown.

“Naganya’s mouth is strong,” Marya said carefully. “But her arm is young. Yours is old, and hard, and I choose it.” Besides, grappling was never Naganya’s style.

Zemlehyed smiled broadly. His rocky eyes prickled moisture like raindrops.

“Morevna chooses!” he beamed. “And chooses best. Zemlehyed knows where Zmey Gorinich nests. Nasha knows nothing but how to make holes. Gorinich sleeps on top of bones. On top of gold. Zemya would like such a bed, but tfu. He makes do.”

The leshy, his moss-hair trailing down in several green braids, held up his forest diadem. He reached down without looking and pulled up a clutch of winter onions, sticking them in so that their green stems fell like a veil from the back of the crown. Zemlehyed reached up and placed it on Marya’s head. It matched her rosy trousers, her black-violet boots.

“He will help you, if you build him a promise.”

“Anything, Zemya.”

The leshy smirked, stroking his fir-needle mustache. “A kiss, for Zemlehyed, on his lips. He won’t tell.”

Marya Morevna laughed. Even devotees of cross-pollination must occasionally be curious, she reasoned. No more harm than in kissing a tree or a rock. And besides, Koschei had kissed all those Yelenas. Or probably had. Who could tell the truth? Marya felt defiance boil up in her chest. She did not care. She would kiss whom she liked. “All right, Zem. A kiss.”

Without warning, the leshy shot up into the air, somersaulted, and came down hard on the mossy loam, digging furiously. His fists flew at the earth; his teeth gnashed and tore; his feet kicked like a diver plunging into deep water. Clumps flew; Zemlehyed disappeared into his hole. After a moment, his fingers, knuckles ringed with lacy mushrooms, popped back up.

“Morevna! Bustle! Faster than you is still too slow.”

Marya took the leshy’s rough hand and he hauled her, headfirst, underground.

Marya flipped in her descent and landed neatly on her feet in quite another forest, full of stubby scrub trees and tall lilac flowers. Golden-orange mountains rose on all sides, closing them in. Zemlehyed hung from the branches of one of the taller trees, kicking his short legs back and forth in delight. He wiggled the top of his head out of a crack in the branch and fell—thump, bash!—onto the needle-strewn ground.

But the forest imp bounced up, and when he righted himself, he was a handsome man in a dark green soldier’s uniform with red piping, his cap sparkling gold. He had a twisted, thorny black beard and muscled arms like pine trunks. Zemlehyed laid his finger aside his nose.

“You cannot tell,” he said, his voice suddenly very much changed. “They mustn’t know.”

Marya Morevna gaped. She could not make her mouth close. All that time, and her friend was … what? She could not even say. A man. And a beautiful one. “Why not? Zem! Even Lebedeva would have to admit you’re handsome!”

“Forests have secrets,” he said gently. “It’s practically what they’re for. To hide things. To separate one world from another. You might not think it, but I love Lebed, and Nasha, with all my muddy heart. But as long as they think I’m stupid I can keep stealing from their stashes and they’ll never suspect. Lebedeva would never think for a moment that I would want her night cream, or Naganya’s holster-blouse. But I have them, and they are mine, and I will not give them back, no.”

“Why would you want them?”

Zemlehyed shrugged. “It’s in my nature. I hoard. It’s in their nature, too, which is why Lebedeva has more night creams than nights, and Nasha collects tin cans. Zmey Gorinich, he is like this as well. But I think it is also in your nature.”

Marya blinked. “I don’t think so. What have I collected?”

Zemlehyed smiled in a lopsided way, as though he did not quite know how to use his face.

“Us.”

The leshy led her through a field of spiky yellow blossoms fuzzy with pollen, heavy with buzzing bees. Puffy white cotton plants waved around them like tiny clouds. The sun pressed its hands to their shoulders, hurrying them along. The mountains, streaked with snow, rose strange and thin around them, as though a starving man slept under the earth, his ribs poking through the stone. They followed a deep blue river that ran deliriously through the meadow, fish splashing as though no spearman could dream of happening by. In the distance, at last, just as the sun was getting red and tired, Marya saw a great furry yurt in the dry grass. Thick, curly fleeces covered its roof; long poles stood tight together, curving in a round sweep. A ram pelt hid the door.

Zemlehyed did not knock. He pushed the pelt aside and ducked into the hut, squeezing his enormous frame into the doorway. Marya followed him into the warm yurt-shadows, where a bald man with round glasses sat at his desk, dwarfed by mountains of paperwork.

“Do you have an appointment?” he roared, a flush traveling all the way from his scalp to his brows in a long red wave.

“We seek Zmey Gorinich,” said Marya, her voice firm.

“You are tiny,” the man concluded. “Zmey Gorinich does not exist for the use of the tiny. Only the big does he notice! As big as he is!”

“I am big.” Zemlehyed shrugged.

“Not very, compared to Zmey Gorinich!” bellowed the man, his head going red again.

“We did not come to compare ourselves to Zmey Gorinich,” said Marya sweetly, measuring the mood of the man in glasses. He grabbed at a sheaf of paper at the bottom of the pile and yanked expertly, pulling it free without disturbing the rest. He set to scribbling in the file. “How could we compete with three heads, a tail like a mountain range, and the breath to burn empires down?”

The man in glasses looked up exasperatedly. “Look, you criminals, I don’t have three heads. I never had three heads! This is what comes of letting writers have free rein, and not bridling them to the righteous labor of the Party the moment they learn to slap an accusative case around. I am Comrade Gorinich, and I have one head.”

“I am not a criminal,” said Marya Morevna. Zemlehyed did not protest for his own honest status, being a goblin and in spirit a criminal, even if no warrants bore his name.

“Of course you are,” snapped Comrade Gorinich. “Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.” Comrade Gorinich gestured at them with an enormous fountain pen. “Even the man who is all his life vigilant, who keeps his mind and body so clean that he never has a single antirevolutionary thought—even that man is a criminal! He should have been effortlessly pure! If he had to fight so hard to hew to Comrade Stalin’s vision, then obviously, he was a criminal all along!”

“I thought you were a dragon,” sighed Marya, sitting down in a small chair. She still longed for the best heights of magic, to see dragons and mermaids, to see the naked world. Not this, which made her think only of home, and how her own warrant might at least read runaway. Zemlehyed stood calmly behind her, at attention.

Comrade Gorinich pounded his files with both fists. “I am a dragon! Look around! What do you see, eh? This is my bed of bones! Look how I crunch them!”

Marya quirked her eyebrow, which seemed to enrage him even further. Soon she thought his head would fly right off. She shrugged. “I don’t see any bones.”

“Your criminal nature blinds you! Look!” He snatched up a file in his hand. “Comrade Yevgeny Leonidovich Kryukov! Convicted of anti-Stalinist organization on Tuesday the twenty-fourth! I had him shot on my lunch break! Bones! Comrade Nadezhda Alexandrovna Roginskaya! Convicted of concealing her fugitive, criminal cousins from me! Arrested on Thursday, shot on Friday before dinner! Bones!” He held an enormous file up above his head. “The village of Bandura, in Ukraine! Refused to collectivize! Too bad—either way they starve to death! Bones!” The bald man leaned over his desk, caressing the papers. “Three hundred and sixty-seven separate anti-Bolshevik spies convicted of the murder of Sergei Mironovich Kirov! Or will be, as soon as we can manage to have Kirov shot in Leningrad! Bones! Bones! Bones!” Gorinich clutched the papers in his fists, quite beside himself. “I sleep with my orders of execution stuffed into my mattress. It is good for my back!”

Marya watched him, horror searing through her, sour and cold. “Why do you do this, Comrade Gorinich?” she said softly.

“It is the least I can do! Here, in the hinterlands, the Party does not have it so easy. People are so attached to their yaks and their children. But I, I understand the east. I have been here longer than the dirt! My mother was a great dragon. She lived in Lake Baikal, snorting storms, spitting floods, diving down to the bottom of the lake to bite the floorboards of the world. My father—you will not believe it, I know!—my father was Genghis Khan, and so great a heart had he that alone of all creatures in heaven and earth he was strong enough to force himself on my gargantuan mother, laughing all the while. My egg rode with the Golden Horde. I nursed at the villages they burned, the bodies full of arrows! I am full of easterners! So I know them, toe and pate. And they know me. They know if they go against the Party, they go against Comrade Gorinich, and Gorinich has always been their comrade, their bedmate, their dinner guest, their funeral master.” He adjusted his glasses and mopped his brow with a red kerchief. “I am a conduit. Moscow, she sends me meat and bones, and I send her rich, soft cotton, rich, soft petroleum. Tribute. It’s an old, honorable system.”

“What do you care if the Party has interests in the east?” Marya said, remaining as calm as she could, for calmness seemed to upset him, and the upset beast is careless. “I am only curious. It seems to me, in the old days, Gorinich did not work for the Tsars.”

“Pah! Why should I? I am a Khan by birthright! The Tsars could offer me nothing I did not have. Dilettantes, the whole painted lot of them. But now! The Party deals in bulk, in industrial quantities. They are like me. Gluttons. They hoard. The Party lines my bed with luxurious femurs, sternums, ribs! Without the Party to tell folk it’s all for their own good, I wouldn’t sleep half so well.”

Comrade Gorinich suddenly clapped one hand over his eye and stretched his neck toward them like a turtle.

“What did you say your name was, criminal girl?” he said sharply.

“Marya Morevna.” Runaway, she thought. That’s all he can say against me. And occasionally rough with her friends, but only because they let her.

Gorinich riffled through his papers, lifting files, his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. “What have we here?” he cried triumphantly. “I knew it, I did! What do I forget? Nothing and no one! Comrade Marya Morevna! Convicted of gross desertion at Leningrad in 1942! Bones! Bones! And that makes you my bones, and that makes you my tribute. What say I shoot you now and get it over with? Why wait? Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally. So why hoard it?”

Marya squared her shoulders and laid one ankle over her knee. She could not, could never show a dragon, even one in glasses, that he had frightened her. If it spooks a horse, it will spook a snake. A Khan respects only strength. Even so, she wanted to be back in her red room, warm, with supper ready.

She leveled a stare at him. “If it belongs to us all equally, then I will take and enjoy my share, thank you.”

“Feh.” Gorinich snorted, dropping the black file back onto his desk. He scribbled in it. “Then you eat up my day and shit out only more paperwork. Now I must note that you were here, that you declined to be shot, that you breathed a cup of air, that you disturbed a tablespoon of dust. You left skin flakes and three strands of hair in exchange. I’m really very busy.”

“If you will give us what we’ve come for, we will happily go,” said Zemlehyed simply.

“And what is that?”

“Your gold,” said Marya. “I don’t think I need much. A coin. One white, one black.”

Comrade Gorinich leaned back in his chair, folding huge, meaty red hands behind his bald head. “You, my young criminal, are an idiot.”

Zemlehyed took off his officer’s cap and cradled it in his muscled, oak-root arms. His wild black hair stuck out in licks and corkscrews. “Gorinchik.” He grinned. “Say no. I would love you to say no.”

“I don’t say no. I don’t say yes. I say you’re an idiot with balls for brains, you hulking leshy rock. Oh, I can see the moss on your bones! Who fools Zmey Gorinich? Nothing and no one! What do you think you’re doing out here? You and me, boy, we can dress ourselves up as men, we can conjugate all our verbs perfectly, and they still won’t love us. She’ll never want you smearing her tits with mud and shooting wet leaves into her. My father was more like us than any human since, and he had it right: Take them if you want them, keep the children, and eat your fill of the world. The best humans will ever give us is tribute. You ask your Koschei. He knows better than anyone. It’s them who’ve no souls and no hearts. Who makes Zmey Gorinich’s bed? Not him!”

“I have a soul,” said Marya Morevna, and the golden faces of the Yelenas crowded her mind. “I have a heart. I don’t sleep on anyone’s bones.”

Comrade Gorinich leered. “You’re young yet. Give it time.”

“You were slurping bones clean long before the Party wrote them down for you,” Marya snapped. “Don’t you go drawing lines between chyerti and humans. You are hungry; we are hungry. What’s the difference?”

“The difference is, the whole world is yours, but you keep pushing us out! It’s not enough to have the cities and the churches, have to have the farms, too. Not enough to have the farms, have to have the forests. Not enough to have the forests, have to have the snow, every flake, every crystal! And now you come demanding my gold, too, as if you have the first idea what a dragon’s treasure is, what it means. Well, I have you beat, Marya Morevna. You are already dead. But me? Zmey Gorinich survives everything. I can be a Mongol if I must. I can be Chinese, if that’s the thing to be. And I can be a good Party man without breaking a sweat. At the end of it all, come looking, and still you’ll find Gorinich swimming the ashes, sunning his belly on your skulls!”

Zemlehyed put his cap back on and straightened it. Then, he walked quietly out the door, letting the goatskin flap fall behind him.

“What is he doing?”

“Go find out for yourself,” said Marya, though she had no idea.

“I can’t, imbecile. What, you think a dragon can turn into a man? I’m too big for that! A man’s flesh is no more than a sock to me. You are so deep in my coils I can already taste you. That chair you sit in, that is also me. This desk is me, this floor, this yurt. Even a few of the flowers outside. My scales, my tongue, my crest, my stomach. I can’t walk outside myself.”

Comrade Gorinich took off his glasses and folded them delicately. He opened his mouth horribly wide, all his flat teeth showing. Wider and wider his mouth gaped, until it fell back over his skull like a hood. Marya bolted for the door, but the air around her swelled and darkened, coils she could not see before shimmering into sight around her, as high as walls and higher, squeezing around her, vising her in. Marya tried to beat against the lizard flesh closing her up, but the coils had pinned her arms already. They reeked of rotting flesh and old marrow. She gulped for breath, her chest shallow and frantic, her head only just protruding from a nest of serpent loops the color of underground caverns, black and blue and silver. She could not see the face of Zmey Gorinich, if he had one, only his inexorably tightening body. Even Marya’s tears were strangled away.

“Comrade Gorinich,” she whispered hoarsely, her voice squeezed away, her heartbeat jangling in her ears. “You will have me, soon enough. Your file said so, and files do not lie. You will have me for your bed of bones, and sleep on me forever. But your file does not say Comrade Marya Morevna, eaten by a Kazakh dragon in 1926! There will be discrepancies, Zmey Gorinich! And paperwork! Let me go. You will not have to wait long.” Then Marya Morevna shut her eyes. She leaned as far forward as she could, and kissed, very gently, the snake-flesh closing around her face.

The coils flushed scalding hot, and Marya truly thought for a moment that she might die there. A tiny flame went up on her cheek, just below her eye. Her lashes began to sizzle—and then the coils were gone. She stood in a cotton field outside the yurt, bent double, chasing her breath. Marya slapped her face to put out the flame.

“Masha!” cried Zemlehyed, farther up the meadow, at the riverbank. “Are you all right?”

“She’s bitter and not worth eating!” bellowed a voice from within the yurt.

Marya ran to the leshy, who had taken off his olive jacket and was sweating in his undershirt.

“Where did you go, Zemya? He might have choked me. He might have killed me.”

Zemlehyed wiped his forehead with one massive fist. “I am diverting this river, Marya Morevna. I am coaxing it to run into that horrid yurt, and wash him away. When he is gone, we shall be able to rifle through the wreckage for coins, white ones and black ones. It was his babbling about the Khans that gave me the idea. We did this sort of thing when they were underfoot.”

Zemya bent by the riverbank, his huge knees popping loudly in the blue air. He gathered up a mound of earth in his arms, so much earth that great, long bones and boulders came up with it, so much that behind the mass no leshy could be seen, and flung it away from him. It exploded against a hillock in a shower of dust and broken rock. Zemlehyed winked at Marya and hopped into the hole he had made, already filling with river water. He leaned his shoulder against one side of the earthen hole and shoved, the cords of his neck taut as guitar strings. He burst through the soil and kept shoving, so fast and so far that Marya immediately lost sight of him amidst the black dirt and the river rushing to fill up the path he had made for it. By the time he reached the yurt, the river could not be stopped. He leapt up out of the foam and roaring water as the current swept over Comrade Gorinich, carrying him along with it to join another stream farther down the hill. The screeching of Zmey Gorinich echoed in the valley, but so did the laughter of Zemlehyed, who spat after him.

Marya walked back to the place the yurt had occupied, her hair drenched with spray, her scalded face throbbing. When she reached the place the yurt had recently occupied, the river had calmed somewhat, and Zemya was picking through the grass, looking for gold.

“There’s nothing here, Zemya,” sighed Marya. “Not even bones. Look, everywhere there is nothing but cotton plants!”

Marya laid her head on one side. She scrambled over to a clutch of cotton, pale wisps blowing lightly in the hot wind. She snapped off one of the fluffy white heads. She knew it, she knew the riddle, and triumph made her scalp tingle.

“Oh, Zemya! I see it now. Do you see it? White gold. Comrade Gorinich was right to laugh at us, begging for coins.” She turned the blossom over in her hand. “And the black must be—”

“Oil,” finished Zemlehyed.

Marya frowned. “But I have no equipment to fish up oil from the earth. Perhaps there are barrels somewhere. Perhaps there is a drill, in the hills.”

Zemlehyed grinned again, his beard glittering with sweat and river water. He drew up one ponderous arm and, with a yell, brought it crashing down against the earth. It gave way, and the leshy sank into the ground up to his shoulders. His face creased as though he were groping in a barrel for herring. Finally, with a cry of strain, he pulled his fist back up again. It overflowed with black ichor, thick, reeking. Zemya sat down heavily, panting, pollen spinning about his head.

And in the dimming, bleeding light, Marya Morevna knelt at his side, put her hands on his broad cheeks, and kissed the leshy just as the first star came on in the sky. It was a real kiss, a deep one, and she meant it.

When she pulled away, Zemlehyed’s craggy face was wet with tears.

“Remember this when you are queen,” he whispered hoarsely. “I moved the earth and the water for you.”

Chairman Yaga crooked her braided eyebrow at the lump of black muck and the cotton flower on her desk. The magicians’ cafe bustled and buzzed beyond her door. She stuck her finger in the oil and licked it experimentally.

“Low-grade.” She snorted.

Marya said nothing. Yaga would accept it.

“Look at you, all full of yourself, thinking two out of three makes you a somebody! Tscha, you are still nobody. The last is hardest—that’s the rule—and you’ll never pull it off.”

“I will, though.”

“Have you decided that you forgive Koschei his girlfriends, then?”

Marya chewed the inside of her cheek. “It is better,” she said slowly, only realizing she told the truth as she said it, “to store up all one’s advantages before one moves. I will have your blessing in my holster before I say one word to him, Chairman Yaga.”

Yaga lit up a cigarillo, blowing a fat ring at her bookshelf. “I see my extremely expensive games are not a complete waste. And you’re at least a bit interesting now, with that fancy scar to remember me by.” Comrade Gorinich’s burning skin had left its mark under her eye, a diamond-shaped blister that nearly cut her lower lid in half. Even when it healed, she would look as though she were weeping gunpowder, weeping wounds. “But it doesn’t matter. Having a brain like a potato and a sweet little civilized cunt that minds its own business, you’ve no hope of besting my last.”

Chairman Yaga gestured toward the window with her cigarillo. “You see my friend out there?”

Marya looked, expecting the car with chicken legs to be there, hooting at stray cats. But outside, in the thick snow and shadows of the endless winter evening, sat a great marble mortar, red as slaughter, bigger than a horse, its pestle slowly grinding around the bowl.

“Ride him. Take him all the way to the northern borders of Buyan, to the spot where the fern flowers grow. There is a cave there, in the cliffside, and in the cave, a chest. Bring me what you find there. My mortar, he won’t make it easy. But you will learn to master him, break him, make him obey you.” Yaga sighed, blowing smoke. “Or you won’t. I can’t teach you about mastery, kid; you either have it or you don’t. And if you don’t, well, you might as well climb into a stove now—your husband will burn you up to keep himself warm, sooner or later.” Baba Yaga beckoned to Marya and patted her lap. Under her black fur she wore a leather apron like a butcher or a blacksmith.

Marya recoiled. “I don’t want to sit on your lap. I’m not a child.”

“The littlest fly on a lump of goat shit interests me more than what you want.”

Marya grimaced, crossed the room, and sat, gingerly, clenching her jaw, on Chairman Yaga’s lap. The crone cupped her face like her own grandmother.

“If you think my brother is any different, girl, then there’s no help for you. He’ll burn you down like wax if you let him. You’ll think it’s love, while he dines on your heart. And maybe it will be. But he’s so hungry, he’ll eat you all in one sitting, and you’ll be in his belly, and what will you do then? Hear me say it, because I know. I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies out of their bodies—and those bodies were so dear to me! But marriage is war, and you do what you must to survive—because only one of you will.”

Marya swallowed hard. “I’m not like that,” she whispered.

“We’ll see. When you’re flying along in a mortar and pestle with the moon screaming in your ear, and you look so much like me no man could tell us apart, we’ll see what you’re like. Only one thing matters, almost-soup: Who is to rule.”

12 Red Compels

“No,” said Madame Lebedeva, dipping her finger into a pot of powder the color of amber. It matched both her teapot and her tea. With a deft movement she swept it over one eyelid and inspected her work in the tall, iron-rimmed mirror of her vanity. A gauzy white skirt fluttered at her ankles; a severe blouse gathered its lace around her throat, pinned by her cameo. Her snowy hair rippled in smooth finger-curls, drawn up into a cascading mass of feathers and pearls. The image on her cameo also had such curls, such feathers and pearls.

“What do you mean, no?” said Marya. Her friend’s denial stung—for all her haughtiness, Lebedeva refused her so little.

“I mean I don’t do that sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?”

Lebedeva sighed and put down her pink cake-icing rouge with the loud smack of metal against enamel.

“What do you think, Masha? The sort of thing where you come to me with some kind of impossible task oddly suited to my particular talents that simply must be completed and Oh, Lebed, darling, help me in my hour of need! I don’t do that. I don’t drink the ocean so you can fetch a ring from the bottom of it, I don’t stay awake for three days to glimpse a snotty little tsarevna traipsing off to who-knows-where, and I certainly don’t mess about with a mortar that never troubled me.”

Madame Lebedeva perused her armory of lipstick and snapped one up decisively, the color of a peony seen through layers of ice.

“What’s eating you? Naganya and Zemlehyed came with me; they helped me. If I fail, Chairman Yaga will have me in her pot.”

“Naganya and Zemlehyed are your companions, Marya.”

Marya warmed a little with embarrassment. She began to feel she had behaved poorly, somehow. “And what are you?”

The pale lady turned incredulously from her mirror. “I am Inna Affanasievna Lebedeva! I am a vila and a magician and I am not your servant, Marya Morevna! What have you done for me except refuse my advances and mock my concerns because they are not your concerns, because you think cosmetics and fashion and society frivolous? What regard have you shown me but to decline my offers of badly needed instruction and allow your other friends to tread on my pride? When have I come to you saying, Masha, help me curse this cattle, help me woo that shepherd for my amusement! I keep to my affairs, which are not your affairs!”

And Marya Morevna knew she had behaved poorly, and was deathly sorry. She could not bear for a beautiful blond girl to speak harshly to her; it pained her in her throat, where a red scarf once lay. “Oh, Lebed! I did not mean to insult you!”

The vila sighed, pinching her cheeks until they got pink and bright. “That is your nature. You may not be a Yelena, but you are a kind of cousin to them. And your sort does not treat my sort well. So no, I will not help you ride the mortar. I certainly don’t wish you eaten, darling; it isn’t that. But I have my pride. Some days, Masha, when I have not made a cikavac and the cafe turns me away at the door; when shepherds shriek and show me the sign of the cross; when Naganya sleeps in your bed and my lover has left me for a bitch rusalka who is only going to drown him, and it serves him right; it’s all I have. And you laugh at me because I try to teach you about lipstick.”

“Well, you must admit, when placed alongside the threat of becoming soup, lipstick is rather silly.”

Madame Lebedeva stared at Marya until Marya felt her cheeks burn and her black blister flare painfully.

“Do you think I am a fool, Masha? All this time, and you speak to me as though I were a flighty pinprick of a girl. I am a magician! Did you never think, even once, that I loved lipstick and rouge for more than their color alone? I am a student of their lore, and it is arcane and hermetic beyond the dreams of alchemists. Did you never wonder why I gave you so many pots, so many creams, so much perfume?” Lebedeva’s eyes shone. “Masha, listen to me. Cosmetics are an extension of the will. Why do you think all men paint themselves when they go to fight? When I paint my eyes to match my soup, it is not because I have nothing better to do than worry over trifles. It says, I belong here, and you will not deny me. When I streak my lips red as foxgloves, I say, Come here, male. I am your mate, and you will not deny me. When I pinch my cheeks and dust them with mother-of-pearl, I say, Death, keep off, I am your enemy, and you will not deny me. I say these things, and the world listens, Masha. Because my magic is as strong as an arm. I am never denied.”

Marya’s unpainted lips parted in surprise.

“I did not know.”

“You did not ask.”

“Please help me, Inna Affanasievna.” Marya took the vila’s pale, soft hands in hers. “Please.”

“Every once in a while, my darling sister, you must do something for yourself.”

Marya looked at Madame Lebedeva—her deep amber eyelids, her pale lips, her frosted cheeks. She could hardly stand the beauty of her friend. It dazzled her. She did not think she could deny Madame Lebedeva, either.

“Will you paint me then, for this task? Will you make up my face, as you have so often asked to do?”

Madame Lebedeva frowned. Her pearly lips turned downward, and she seemed a space older.

“No, Mashenka. I will not. It would only be an extension of my will, and it is yours that is at issue. But I will say to you: Blue is for cruel bargains; green is for daring what you oughtn’t; violet is for brute force. I will say to you: Coral coaxes; pink insists; red compels. I will say to you: You are dear to me as attar of roses. Please do not get eaten.”

Madame Lebedeva leaned forward on her little gold stool and kissed Marya on both cheeks, eyelashes gently fluttering against Marya’s temples. She smelled like rain falling through honeysuckles, and when she drew away, her kisses remained on Marya’s skin, little twin circles of pink, almost invisible.

“Remember this when you are queen,” she breathed. “I told you my secrets.”

A bashful winter’s noontime showed only its modest ankle before slipping into darkness again. Marya walked along Skorohodnaya Road, kicking clumps of ice. Mastery, she thought. I know nothing of that. Who was master when Koschei fed me and silenced me? Not I. An explosion of laughter spilled out of a tavern with eaves of black braids that hung down the corners like bellpulls. Marya stopped and stroked the building’s wall: pale, smooth skin, too hairless to be anything but a girl’s. The building shivered with the attention. And yet, I chose to be silent, to eat what he fed me. And he shook when he touched me. I made him weak enough to shake. What does any of it mean?

Marya stopped and turned up her face to the stars, which sparkled like the points of knives. She turned up the collar of her long coat; the wound below her eye pulsed in the cold. She thought of the year that had turned since she had come to Buyan, how she had trembled when she first saw the Chernosvyat, the fountains of warm blood even now gurgling behind her, Naganya’s fearful clicking laugh. Nineteen forty-two, she thought. At Leningrad. It was the at that made her shudder. Not in Leningrad. At Leningrad. At least I shall die at home. But did he really say I would die? He said gross desertion. I will be a deserter. Same as a runaway, really. And what is home? Buyan is home. Leningrad is so far; 1942 is so far. Why would I ever go back?

“Volchya-Yagoda,” she whispered, reaching into the wind for something familiar, something huge and kind.

“Yes, Marya,” said the voice of the horse, beside her in a moment as though he had always been there, breathing against her shoulder. He glowed milky in the night.

“I wondered, if I wanted you, if you would come.”

“I would not call it a rule. But I have very good ears, and I am fast.”

Marya turned and put her arms around the horse’s long neck. He did not smell of horse, but of exhaust and metal.

“Promise me, Volchya. Promise that you will never take me back to Leningrad. If I do not go back, I cannot die there.”

“Did someone say you were going to die?”

Marya’s brow furrowed. “Well, no, not exactly. He said convicted. But convicted usually means died.”

“Perhaps it will not be so bad.”

“Volchya, you must swear it. What do horses swear on?”

“Nothing.” Volchya spoke with a strange accent, his brassy deep voice pinched and contorted. “Horses are godless. There is only the rider, and the whip. But I promise.”

“Take me home, Volchya.”

The bone-pale horse crouched down and wriggled within Marya’s embrace so that she found herself swept up onto his back before she could breathe twice. She could feel his oily blood churning hot and heavy beneath her. He turned toward the Chernosvyat, a dark blot against the dark sky. In the torchlight, the shadows of his bones moved under his thin skin.

“Why do you let me ride you? Are you more tame than Chairman Yaga’s mortar?”

Volchya-Yagoda snorted. “That thing is a dish. It has no mouth, no teeth. You cannot call something living if it has no mouth. Many things in Buyan are mixed-up and backwards—mossy rocks and guns that speak, birds that turn into men and buildings like youths—but you will notice that everything living has a mouth. Mouths bite and swallow; they talk; they taste. They kiss. A mouth is the main tool for living. The mortar is like a very vicious spaniel. It is alive in some sense, but you wouldn’t set it a place at dinner.” His hoofbeats echoed in the darkness. “As for why I let you ride me, ah, what a terrible science, riding and being ridden! Which is the servant: the one who bears his mistress, or the one who combs and brushes her mount? It is simple, Marya Morevna. You served me when first we met. You polished my skin and gave me new shoes. You slept against my flank. Service buys service. In my four hearts, service is the only possible expression of love. I serve Koschei. But if you had not run your hand along my fetlock, I would never have served you.” Volchya-Yagoda turned his gaunt head to nip at her. It hurt, but she took it as it was meant, gently, with affection. “But that will not work with the mortar, you know. It is a kitchen beast. You could not make yourself so low as to serve it, not if you crawled on your belly. And Yaga’s tests never measure the length of your humility. It wants force, Marya. It wants you to be bigger than it is. It wants a mistress, and it is accustomed to one who is ancient and strong, whose thighs can crush it between them, whose iron hips drive it home. You will never manage it.”

“Everyone is so sure I cannot do it.”

“Oh, Marya, of course you can’t! Even after a year with us you are gentle and kind yet! A little wilder, perhaps, more keen to bite and be bitten, to steal and fight, but how warm you are still. How willing to do as you are told. That is no girl to ride the mortar. You do not have it in you. Come, I will take you to the north wall. You can fetch her bauble, and no one will be wiser.”

Marya shook her head. “She needs only to ask the mortar and I will be caught.”

“I told you, it has no mouth to betray you.”

Marya frowned deeply. She wanted it to be that easy. To be helped along. So much nicer to be helped along. But Madame Lebedeva’s voice sounded in her: Every once in a while, my darling sister, you must do something for yourself.

“The task is not the bauble, it is the mortar,” she sighed finally. “Take me to my tower, Volchya. That’s all. I must find the way myself.”

They rode in silence for a long while. Skorohodnaya Road stretched out like a black ribbon, the great pendant of the moon sliding down its center.

“Volchya-Yagoda, may I ask you a last thing?”

The great horse sighed. “You want answers like oats in a feedbag, Marya.”

“I have spoken with domoviye and leshy and Zmey Gorinich himself, and all of them call themselves loyal; they love the Party like a mother. They recite back to me the slogans of my childhood, and their eyes shine with fierceness. And yet Koschei lives in his great palace and Lebedeva hoards her night creams and her cameos and prizes her patronymic. Little folk scramble to wear badges of belonging on their breasts, to agitate and join up, but big folk live as they always have, like dragons, like Tsars. How can this be?”

Volchya-Yagoda considered. “Is it not so in your world?”

“I suppose. But such things upset people. We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.”

The stallion snorted, and his breath curled in the cold. “Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlor game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.”

Marya did not light her lamps. Her eyes moved fondly over her red room, turned black by the moon and shadows. She trailed her hands over her things: a brocade chair, the curtained bed all full of silky, bristling furs, her silver writing desk, a firebird’s flaming quill, burning dimly as it slept. Somewhere, a beast missed that feather. Marya regretted suddenly that she had never written anything at that desk, not even a letter home, to her sisters at their marriage-hearths. Not even a poem. Her fingers, hunting and purposeful though her heart drooped hopelessly, found her vanity and its tall mirror, the pots and boxes and brushes Lebedeva had given her on every holiday with calligraphed cards abjuring her to enter the world of grown women and all their secret privileges.

Marya Morevna sat at her mirror, as lightly as in dreams. Her hands fluttered over the array of cosmetics as though they played a harpsichord. The pots brimmed with colors that made her heart swim, creamy, untouched swirls of oxblood and peacock indigo and a pink like a kitten’s paw.

I shall be red as slaughter, as the stone of the mortar, she thought. She collected her memories of Lebedeva’s toilet like cards in her heart: how she had done it, the strokes of her pale hands, the order in which the vila had painted her face. First the powder, like snow, swept over her cheeks and brow with a heavy puff of ram fleece. Then to line her eyes. Marya chose a tiny carved pot of gold pigment, like an icon, a saint’s eyes. Each of her lashes she lined in silver, the wetness of it cool and slippery on her skin. Then she took up a thin boar’s-hair brush and dipped it in crimson, carnelian dust. Under her brow bone she drew a long red line, and over her lids she drew a darker scarlet still, like the blood that pools at the bottom of a heart. Red compels. She pinched her cheeks and rubbed a shiny ruby-bronze cream into them. The lips came last—the mouth that Volchya-Yagoda said was the tool of the living. She found among the forest of lipsticks a fearful autumnal shade, like fire, like dying leaves.

Marya looked at herself in the glass, still herself but girded, made more terrible, older. She had not managed it all flawlessly, as Lebedeva would have done. Her face was a little wild, a little ragged, the lines around her eyes wobbling, the colors too bright, unblended, unsubtle, as if an old woman’s weak eyes and shaking fingers had drawn them. Marya raised up her hands and folded her long black hair into a savagely tight chignon, so tight the pins that held it drew tiny drops of blood from her scalp. In the night, with the moon so high and quiet all around her, she knew the rest like a poem recited. Laughing with Naganya in the sunlight, she could never have thought of it. But the night, close around and heavy, guided her steps, her choices. She went to her closet and drew out a leather apron she’d gotten in summer, when Zemya had decided her arms were too skinny and taught her to beat out fireplace pokers from bubbling iron. It was so heavy, its straps weighting her down, digging into her neck, her waist. Oh, I will be sorry, she thought as she pulled on her thickest, blackest fur and closed it over the apron. Into her pockets she gathered the dry duck bones of last night’s supper, still resting on their ivory tray. Onto her throat went a daub of resinous myrrh and a splash of vodka from a crystal bottle.

Marya Morevna did not want to look in her mirror again. She feared what waited in the glass. But she crept up on herself, and dragged up her eyes to see. How broad her chest, suddenly; how dark and squared her shoulders. How the fur brushed her pale chin; how severe her hair and dark lips looked!

“I am Marya Morevna, daughter of twelve mothers, and I will not be denied,” she whispered to the girl in the mirror.

Far below, on the snowy street, the red mortar waited, impatient, steaming in the winter night.

It snuffled the black air and purred in its odd way: The black pestle ground slowly, with satisfaction, around the bowl of the mortar. Ah! There is the smell of old bones and embalming spices that is my mistress! It jumped up, thrilling to her nearness, stamping deep circles in the snow. Ah! There is the black coat and flapping leather apron that is my mistress! The mortar began to spin with anticipation. Ah! There is the bloody mouth, fresh from a husband, and that means my mistress!

But the mortar hopped fretfully back and forth, out of reach. It smelled youth, too, under the old bones and spilled liquor, and the dark figure did not seem big enough, and her hair was black where it should have been white.

The dark, fur-swaddled figure walked up to the uncertain mortar. Without a moment’s hesitation, she snarled and slapped the mortar hard across its belly.

“Let me up, you ugly teacup!” she growled, pitching her voice low and rough.

The mortar exulted. There is the rough hand and cruel words that my mistress owns! It tipped forward onto its face, abject, so that its beloved witch Yaga could climb in.

But as soon as it scooped her up, the mortar knew it had accepted an impostor. My mistress weighs more than three bakers who gobble their own bread! Out, out, tiny liar!

Marya’s feet slipped and skidded in the concave bowl, scrabbling for purchase. The mortar spun and lurched, trying to spill her out. It bucked, reared. It launched up into the air, flipped itself and slammed sharply down in the snow three times—but still Marya clung to the pestle, gritting her teeth, clawing at the smooth stone with her fingernails until they snapped and bled. When the mortar had gotten itself right side up again, she straddled the pestle between her legs like a broomstick, her knees knocking gently into the smooth grooves where Baba Yaga’s knees were accustomed to resting. The stone seethed, hot as a stove bottom, pulsing as though blood moved through it. Marya Morevna drove into it with her knees, her bones grinding painfully down against it, but still the mortar protested, trying to bounce hard enough to bash her head into its sides.

Marya wrapped one arm around the pestle, her thighs squeezing the trunk of it, and dug in her pocket. Hauling out a dried duck leg, she rolled it against the bowl of the mortar, to give the beast the scent of fatty, rich fowl, and then flung it down Skorohodnaya as hard as she could. The mortar leapt, ravenous, and hopped after it, up into the air and down again, leaving a trail of wide, deep stampings in the snow behind it, like an endless ellipsis.

Between her legs, the pestle rattled and shuddered, whipping her around the bowl. Pain flared white and black everywhere she slammed into stone, and then again, when her bruises got bruised.

“North, trash heap!” she hissed at the mortar, broadening her voice, shredding it. The mortar paused, confused again by her voice, which would never be as broad or shredded as its owner’s. Marya Morevna breathed deep, the stabbing cold flowing through her. I am not so stupid that I do not listen to you, Chairman Yaga! I know what this is about! She bore down on the pestle, letting it press lasciviously against her, its pulsating heat suffusing through her legs, her belly. She ground her bones against the thing, circling her hips, pushing at it, coaxing. She opened her legs wider, until it felt like a part of her, a stone Marya jutting out awkwardly from her body, swollen and wild. She swiveled herself so that the pestle pointed north and thrust forward. The mortar spun once more, in joy, thrilling to her touch—this was right, this was what it knew!—and bolted north, through the dark and the ice.

The wind cut right through her, lifting her chest out toward the starry trees. A kind of awful pleasure sliced through her: the pine air and the freezing moonlight; the warm, leaping pestle beneath her; and the soft pocking sounds of the mortar stamping the snow. All the small beasts of the forest shrank away from the road and the screaming laughter of Marya Morevna as the starlight whipped her red cheeks. She rode the mortar and pestle like a savage thing, ripping through the night.

The northern boundary of Buyan flows over a hilly, snowbound country. The earth there has never yet seen the sun. All year the ice crowds close around the three or four grass seeds that valiantly pray for the coming of light. Once, the leshiyi built a wall through the winter, so that the northern sea would know it was forbidden here. But like all stones touched by leshiyi, the wall sighed and dreamed and wished for more than it had, and all the while, silently grew. Now, only an archaeologist might be able to guess that the purple-black cliff with a dozen goats gnawing at its roof was once a wall, could see the old, vague shapes of bricks in the foot of the cliff. Could pick out the crack of a cavern, where the wall’s watchtower was once kept, from which alarms once rang down the valleys, rung by some mossy, granite-heavy soul.

The mortar, no archaeologist, but afflicted with a kind of dumb sympathy for the old wall, stone to stone, brought Marya Morevna right to the cavern, little more than a slit in the rock, like the thin triangle of darkness between the pages of a book left facedown on a white table. The mortar stomped three times in the snow and tipped forward, spilling Marya out into the tamped circle of firm snow in the midst of soft, hushed drifts. The pestle rolled around the bowl, purring, begging for approval. Marya thought of kissing it, but knew Chairman Yaga would not grace her beast so. She gave it another hard smack instead. The mortar snapped back upright, spinning in rapture.

Snowflakes blew into the crevice; three winds skipped in, howling hollow and hoarse. Marya Morevna’s black fur glittered, nearly white with clumps of ice. She ducked into the cave mouth, her skin still flushed from the riding, her breath steaming in the stony closet. The ceiling drooped low, stalagmites like drops of spittle teetering above her head as the floor sloped down, down, into the dark. How can I find a chest in all this blackness? Marya despaired, her hands groping in front of her, clutching at shadows.

“Haroo, Grandmother!” growled someone invisible, somewhere beyond Marya’s grasp. “Why do you stumble about so? Are you drunk again?”

“Gahvoo!” another raspy voice howled. “Someday you’ll sprout gills and learn to breathe vodka. And then we will miss you!”

“Guff, guff,” grumbled a third. “I shall light you a match on my teeth.” A phosphor-flash sparked, turning the cave walls green and white.

Four dogs panted amiably before Marya, their paws huge and bony in the ghostlight: a proud wolf slowly beating her thick tail against the cave floor; a starved racing hound licking his chops; a haughty lapdog, his curled fur fringing his face like a little mane; and a fat spotted sheepdog, her chin resting on two pillars of congealed saliva like long, thick teeth. Marya sucked in her breath. Behind them sat a glass chest, frosted over, glittering.

“Rup, rup!” yipped the lapdog. “You’re looking very fine tonight, Grandmother! Why, you’ve hardly any warts at all! Bathing in blood again, I’ll warrant. Virgins or capitalists this time?”

Marya could feel her eyeliner sticky around her lashes, her hair half-loose from its bun. I must look frightful—but then, frightful is what they expect. What they want.

“Virgins,” she snarled. The fat sheepdog leaned forward on her pillars of spit, which wobbled like jelly.

“Guff, guff! Your voice is so strong and loud, Grandmother!” she whined. “Last time you visited, you sounded like you’d swallowed six knives! How’d you get it so sweet?”

Marya bit her lip. “I, er, I drank up a songbird’s soul,” she barked. “Just cracked open her little chest and sucked the song right up, like marrow through a bone!” After a moment, she added, “As if it’s any of your business!”

“Haroo, Grandmother,” howled the wolf, her eyes round and cunning. “Your skin is so soft and smooth! Last time you visited, you looked like a crumpled page! You had more spots than a toadstool! How did you get it so supple?”

“Comrade Stalin’s wife is nursing!” Marya hissed, warming to her pantomime. She spat onto the floor of the cave for good measure. “I snuck into her room in the night and squeezed her teats out into a tub until I could swim in her milk and rub it into my skin like night cream! Tired out that old cow so she could hardly walk in the morning!” After a moment, she added, “You mangy old bitch!”

“Gah-voo,” huffed the racing hound, his ribs showing like the strings of a balalaika. “Your scent is so delicious, Grandmother! Last time you visited, you smelled like death and tooth rot!” The hound inhaled deeply. “Now I smell orange blossoms and fresh blood under a bouquet of old duck bones and myrrh. How did you get yourself so clean?”

Marya squeezed her fists hard in her pockets. She spun out her lie like thread. “I found an old perfume peddler traveling to Odessa with his wagon. After I rode him through the forest, I snatched up all his little bottles and smashed them against my forehead, one for every gulp of vodka in his stash!” After a moment, she added, “He died! I killed him!”

The dogs looked dubious. The pillars of saliva jiggled as water dripped on them from the stone ceiling. Finally, the wolf shrugged her furry shoulders.

“Haroo, Grandmother. What brings you to our house tonight? If you are hungry, we have a nice blood soup boiling, if Bitter here hasn’t lapped it all up.”

The racing hound reached up and bit the wolf’s ear. “What have I said about using my name? No one is supposed to know!”

The wolf rolled her yellow eyes, turned bone-bright by the phosphorescent light. “It’s our grandmother, Bitter. She knows our names. Besides, she would never harm our Papa! Unless he really deserved to be hurt; then she would.”

“Well, Bile,” groused the hound, “don’t tell means don’t tell. Even a last-born pup knows that.”

“Rup, rup! I shan’t ever tell my name,” yapped the lapdog, licking his paws. “That way, when Papa comes to praise us, he will know I was good and the rest of you were naughty, wicked curs, and pat me on the head and give me biscuits.”

The sheepdog laughed, the rumbling of her swollen chest shaking the pillars of spit. Her jowls sloughed over their edges. “She’s our babushka, Blood, you ungrateful, toadying poodle! See if she brings you New Year’s presents!” The lapdog squeaked in indignation at the sound of his name. The sheepdog looked up at Marya in frank, canine adoration. “Will you let me ride with you again this year? How I remember the wind in my cheeks!”

“Haroo, Brumal, you kiss-up! She called you a drunken hag, Grandmother. I heard her, not a week ago,” crooned the wolf confidentially.

“And I said she wouldn’t be angry! Would you, Grandmother? I was singing a dinner song in your honor! Drunken hag rhymes with hearts in a bag!”

“You and your songs!” giggled the lapdog, Blood. “Star of the Moscow stage, you are!”

Brumal leapt off her saliva-pillars and tackled Blood with a snarl.

Marya watched them fight. She could not believe her luck—all their names, cast into her lap like dolls. But if these were Koschei’s dogs, then Koschei’s death rested in that shining glass chest. Chairman Yaga clearly meant for her to steal it and return to the Chernosvyat triumphant, only to be shown up as a faithless Yelena who meant only to destroy him. And yet, if she did not return with it, Yaga would devour her, and none of her innocence would matter. Her belly churned. The dogs wrestled at her feet, blood dripping from both of their throats.

“Blood,” she whispered, holding out her hands. “Brumal, peace.”

The two dogs froze, the whites of their eyes showing. They turned to look at her, betrayal sparkling in their gaze, and fell down dead, Blood curled into rigor on Brumal’s enormous, spotted chest.

The regal wolf leapt at her, slavering.

“You are no Grandmother!” she spat.

“Bile, Bitter!” Marya shouted fearfully—and the wolf fell dead out of the air, thumping onto the cave floor with a crackle of bones. The racing hound died quietly, lying in a tight ball, minding his own business, as though he had always expected to die this way.

The chest gleamed softly, ringed in dead dogs. Marya knelt and worked its slippery clasp. The lid sprang open with a jingle of broken ice.

Inside lay an egg, wrapped up in black silk. A simple hen’s egg, brown and round, its crown spattered with freckles.

13 The Tsar of Life and the Tsar of Death

Marya Morevna wanted to run across the throne room to Koschei, to lay her head in his lap, to tell him everything that she had suffered, to hear him reassure her with some obvious explanation of the girls in the factory which did not include the word Yelena. But he sat heavily on his throne of onyx and bone, his chin thrust into his hands. He did not look at her. The same maps and papers cluttered his great table, and Koschei scowled so deeply the walls curved away from him, desperate to escape his displeasure. He did not even flinch when the tall black door banged open and Baba Yaga stomped in, her cigarillo leaving blue trails like battle flags behind her. She strode up to Koschei’s chair, her coat flaring, and kissed him wetly on the lips, her wide mouth hungrily devouring him. Koschei turned up his face and returned her kiss. Marya was too racked to gasp or cry out. Her eyes simply filled with tears, and she wanted to disappear.

“Don’t look so shocked, soup!” laughed Chairman Yaga, smacking her lips. “This one was my husband, oh, centuries back! My ninth, I think. Only fair that I rumple your mount a bit: My mortar is half in a swoon with your riding it so hard, rubbing another mistress’ musk on its pestle so that the poor beast gets all confused!”

“You said he was your brother,” Marya said numbly, her face burning. Her chest sank, kicked in by the sight of them.

“Chyerti, kid. Demons. What should we care? When you live forever, sooner or later you try everything, just to see. Didn’t work out, though, all the same.” Yaga caressed Koschei’s cheek tenderly with the back of her hand. “The only one I couldn’t eat.” Koschei smiled wanly. The crone jumped off the black dais and marched up to Marya, her breath dank and old in her face. She looked over Marya’s coat, her leather apron, her makeup. “I get to give the tests because I know what it takes to be married to a snake. I do know what I’m talking about.” She pursed her cracked lips. “I just love your coat, Marya.”

“I passed your tests, Chairman Yaga.”

“Oh? Well, then, let’s see it!”

Marya pulled the egg from where she had kept it, close to her breast, warm and safe. Koschei hissed, sucking his breath through his teeth.

“I told you, Brother. Just like the others. She’ll be the death of you.”

Chairman Yaga turned the egg over in her calloused hand, cracked it open, and slurped up the insides, her teeth shining with yellow yolk.

Marya cried out, agonized. Was that his death? It looked like an egg. “No! You can’t! I did everything you asked me!”

Baba Yaga sucked her tongue. “She’s right! Have her if you still want her, Kostya. I give my blessing with both hands. She’s a sneaking, lying, dog-murdering thief, and she looks just like me! I’ll even dower the bitch.” The old woman sat with a satisfied plop at the map-strewn desk, putting out her cigarillo on a sketch of the countryside.

Hot tears fell down Marya’s face. “I didn’t know where she’d send me. I didn’t know the dogs would be there—”

“But once you got there you killed them all and took the egg,” pointed out Baba Yaga. “Knowing exactly what you did. My poor, bereaved brother raised those dogs from pups.”

“Koschei, say something!” Marya pleaded. “Why don’t you speak to me?”

“What should I say?” Koschei said softly, his voice dark and grinding. “It should be clear that the egg was not my death, since my sister has made lunch of it. Why would I ever have told you where I hid it? Of course you would go after it. You can’t help it. Tell a girl something is a secret and nothing will stop her from ferreting it out.”

“You lied to me.” And she meant it all. The egg, the Yelenas. The insult to her girlhood. Everything.

Koschei’s face betrayed no expression at all. “With good reason, as you can see.”

“You cannot condemn me for betrayal—a betrayal connived by her, contrived by her!—if you lied to me yourself, and about more than the egg.”

Koschei cocked his head to one side curiously, like a black bird. He rose and crossed the room to her, taking her face in his long fingers. He gripped her jaw tightly. “Have I condemned you, Marya Morevna? Have I called you faithless?”

Marya wept bitterly, an unlovely, shattered kind of crying that strained at the bones of her face. When tears slipped over her scar, they sizzled and burned. “You left me alone to do all those awful things myself without seeing you, without talking to you. I saw the factory, but I couldn’t see you to ask how you could keep those girls, what you would do with me if I disobeyed.”

Koschei studied her, his black eyes roving. “Of course I left you alone. Wedding preparations are the province of the bride. Should I have shepherded you like a father, so that anything you did would not be your own deed, but mine? I have no need to prove myself worthy of myself.”

Marya jerked her chin free. “But what have I to prove? It should be you wrapped up in Zmey Gorinich’s coils, proving that you are not a monster, that you are worthy of me!”

“Have I not proven it? Have I not taken you out of your starving city and fed you, clothed you in fine things, taught you how to listen and how to speak, brought you to a place where you are a mistress, a tsarevna adored and worshipped, made love to, your skin dusted with jewels? Did I not dower myself? Did I not come to you on my knees with a kingdom in my hand? And as for those girls, they belong to me, and that should terrify you. It should cow you and keep you gibbering and silent at my feet, like a beaten dog who knows what’s coming to her. Yet you still shout at me and rip your face from my hands and call me unworthy. You come to me dressed like my sister, with my death in your coat. No matter that it is not my death. You thought it was. Why do you do these things, even knowing that those girls sew away at my armies through this very hour?” Koschei wrapped his arms around her and drew her close. Marya shut her eyes against him, her lover, her death, her life. But she was afraid, too, of all of the things he could be. “I will tell you why. Because you are a demon, like me. And you do not care very much if other girls have suffered, because you want only what you want. You will kill dogs, and hound old women in the forest, and betray any soul if it means having what you desire, and that makes you wicked, and that makes you a sinner, and that makes you my wife.”

No. I do care. I will get what I desire by all the tricks I know, and what those girls in the factory desire, too. You are mostly right, my love. But still wrong. She could say none of it, but she saved it in her chest, where it did not need to be spoken.

Baba Yaga chewed off the tip of her thumbnail and spat it at them. “She kissed the leshy, you know. And not a nice kiss, either. She used her tongue and tasted his mud.”

Koschei pushed Marya away to stare at her coldly. “Is this true?”

“Yes.” She felt no shame on this score.

Koschei smiled. His pale lips sought hers, crushing her into a kiss like dying. She tasted sweetness there, as though he still kissed her with honey and sugar on his tongue. When he pulled away, his eyes shone.

“I don’t care, Marya Morevna. Kiss him. Take him to your bed, and the vila, too, for all it matters to me. Do you understand me, wife? There need never be any rules between us. Let us be greedy together; let us hoard. Let us hit each other with birch branches and lock each other in dungeons; let us drink each other’s blood in the night and betray each other in the sun. Let us lie and lust and take hundreds of lovers; let us dance until snow melts beneath us. Let us steal and eat until we grow fat and roll in the pleasures of life, clutching each other for purchase. Only leave me my death—let me hold this one thing sacred and unmolested and secret—and I will serve you a meal of myself, served on a platter of all the world’s bounty. Only do not leave me, swear that you will never leave me, and no empress will stand higher. Forget the girls in the factory. Be selfish and cruel and think nothing of them. I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I. I will have you in my hoard, Marya Morevna, my black mirror.”

Marya trembled. She felt something shake free inside her and drift away like ash. She reached up to him and gripped his jaw in her hand, digging her nails into his cold flesh. She would make her gambit; it was all she could do. “If you want me, Koschei Bessmertny, tell me where your death is. Between us there must be no lies. To the world we may lie and go stalking with claws out, but not to each other. It is only fair: You know where my death is, at the point of your knife or between strangling fingers or in a glass of poison. Show me that you can rest in my hand like a chick, small and weak and knowing that I could crush you if I wished it, but that I will not, will never. You owe me this, on the bodies of all those Yelenas, all those Vasilisas—and you owe me their bodies, too.”

Koschei said nothing for a long while. His face floated above her, impassive, unmovable.

“Don’t do it, Brother,” sighed Baba Yaga.

“A butcher in Tashkent guards my death,” he said finally. “I left it in his care when I came for you. It sits in the eye of a needle, which sits inside an egg, which sits inside a hen, which sits inside a cat, which sits inside a goose, which sits inside a dog, which sits inside a doe, which sits inside a cow, and the cow lives with the butcher, very beloved of him and his children. His sons ride upon the cow who contains my death and slap its rump.”

Marya kissed him hard, as if to drag out the truth, and the fringe of her black coat brushed against his chin.

Chairman Yaga sat back in her chair. She lit a new cigar, and spat.

“I guess some people would call those vows,” she grumbled, but the crone smiled, showing her brown teeth, still stained with golden yolk. “Weddings give me gas.”

A cold wind began to seethe through the windowless room. It picked up speed, circling like a racing horse, whirling around and around, riffling through maps and papers, prickling skin, blowing hard and fast until it screamed by Marya Morevna and Koschei and Baba Yaga alike, snatching at their clothes, their hair, stealing their breath. Koschei raised his arms to shield his new wife. Baba Yaga rolled her eyes.

“Shit,” she said succinctly, and the wind stopped short, leaving a white silence in its place.

And someone stood in the room who had not stood there before. The man’s black hair fell all the way to the floor. He wore a grey priest’s cassock, and his chest glowed with a splatter of silver light, like a star. His eyelids were so long that they covered his body like a priest’s stole, their lashes brushing the floor. He held out his hands, stretching his long, colorless fingers toward them.

“My congratulations on your nuptials, Brother,” the man rasped. His voice sounded far away, heard through three sheets of glass. “I would have brought gifts, if I had been invited. Cattle. And cease-fires.” He smoothed his eyelids like lapels.

“But you weren’t invited, Viy,” snapped Baba Yaga. “Because you make a terrible guest. Putting out all the fires and wasting the dancing girls to skeletons when everyone else is trying to have a good ogle. Why would anyone invite you?”

“Because I attend all weddings, Night,” purred Viy. “Death stands behind every bride, every groom. Even as they say their vows, the flowers are rotting in her crown, his teeth are rotting in his head. Cancers they will not notice for thirty years grow slowly, already, in their stomachs. Her beauty browns at the edges as the ring slides up her finger. His strength saps, infinitesimally, as he kisses her. If you listen in the church, you can hear my clock tick softly, as they tock together toward the grave. I hold their hands as they stride proudly down the very short road to dotage and death. It’s all so sweet, it makes me cry. Let me kiss your bride on both cheeks, Life. Let me feel her hot blood slowly cool against my eyelids.”

“She is not for you, my brother,” said Koschei.

“Oh? Have you removed her death, too, then? I remember when you did yours—feh, what a mess!” Beneath his eyelids Marya could see the orbs of Viy’s eyes turn to her. “Of course he hasn’t. Has he, child? I can see your death blossoming like a mushroom on your chest.” Marya’s hand rose to her chest, groping for the invisible death’s-head there. Viy extended his fingers toward her, slowly, as if moving through water. A pinprick stung between her breasts—it did not hurt, exactly, but it anchored her, wholly, so that she knew Viy could move her wherever he liked. He had caught her by her heart, or her death, or both, and she wavered as he wove his ghastly fingers through the dark air. Marya had never even thought to ask for her own death to be gouged out. Not so clever, after all. She fought to hold still, to resist, but her torso writhed and shuddered. Viy dropped his hand and shook his ponderous head. The sting faded. “Don’t take it personally. Never for anyone else does our brother take out his scalpel. Only he lives forever. Everyone else, one way or another, is for me. Can only be for me. And Life, that old tyrant, he knows my land is fertile now. So many white flowers. So many dead since ’17. So many more of us than of you. Soon there will be nowhere you can walk where my folk do not flow over and around you, do not drink of your sweat, do not swallow your heat. So maybe I will still attend your wedding, eh, girl? Maybe it will be me standing by your wraith at a silver altar, putting a stone ring on the shade of your finger, suckling at the ghost of your virginity. I could fight on the field of your belly. We could split you like a province, between him and me.”

Baba Yaga scratched her braided eyebrow. “So, how did you manage to break the treaty, Viy? You aren’t allowed in Buyan and you know it. There’s doors and dogs between you and us. These little family gatherings are so awkward! Three of us in a room! That hasn’t happened since … hm, I make it since the fall of Constantinople. We went to so much trouble to keep your carcass out. It hurts our feelings when you ignore our wishes like this. Of course, oldest children are always stuffed full of their own snot.”

Viy looked at her with a strange expression—something, Marya thought, like love and care. “And what of your carcass, Night? I’ll have it too, before the century turns. We’ll all be together, one family, with one head.” The edges of Viy’s smile vanished beneath his eyelids. “The raskovnik,” he hissed with vicious satisfaction, “unlocks all locks. How considerate of our Marya to go and fetch it for us! No fool like a new bride, the old tales say. And it was not so hard a thing to send my soldiers following her stinking, beating, hollering heart across the border, then pull her off her horse so she might not see us snuffling where her vintovnik snuffled. The doors of the Country of Life lie open, and even now my comrades are streaming in like water to celebrate your wedding and leave our gifts at your doorstep. I do hope you like them. After all, Marya Morevna, we are family now.”

Viy bowed courteously, his long eyelids wrinkling. Before anyone could take another breath, he bent over at the waist until he folded up into a great white albatross and flapped slowly out of the door and down the long black stairs. Marya tore away from her new husband and after the Tsar of Death, chasing the pale, gleaming tail feathers of the bird until he burst through the huge, carved gate of the Chernosvyat and wheeled up into the grey morning sky, cawing a lonely, doleful cry.

Skorohodnaya Road stretched out before her, streaked with silver like spilled paint. Wherever the silver lay it wriggled, eating into the stone until it boiled. Infantrymen with silver-plashed chests marched through the houses, bashing in windows with the butts of their rifles, calling inside with their faraway voices, bayoneting the taverns until the walls bled. From everywhere came the sound of glass shattering.

And leaning against the rear wall of the magicians’ cafe, piled up with pale flowers and ribbons as though they were meant to be presents, rested Zemlehyed, mud trickling from a gash in his stony head, and Naganya, her iron jaw stove in, and Madame Lebedeva, a neat bullet hole blooming over her heart. She had painted her eyes red, of course, to match. Their dark stares tilted towards the dawn, but saw nothing.