Enchantment

15

Hijacking

Ivan and Katerina didn't pack much for the return trip. Katerina had quite a lot of American clothes now, but she wasn't going to be wearing them long. They knew they had to get back to the bridge as soon as possible. Once they left the protection of Mother's house, Baba Yaga could make a run at them anywhere. Yet there was no way to avoid the exposure. As Mother put it, "She found out that you were in America. She got here somehow. She found out about Ruthie and got to her. We're not going to keep many secrets from her. All you can do is try to move fast enough that she can't get ahead of you and lay traps."

So they made the reservation and paid for first-class seats even though it cost ten thousand dollars—because those were the only seats they could find on the fifth of July. Ivan was cautious to please even his mother: He wrote a note on a napkin explaining to Katerina and his parents that they would fly out of Rochester instead of Syracuse even though it was an hour farther away. Then he soaked the note in water and ran it down the garbage disposal. Then he made the reservation over the Internet so no one ever said "Rochester" out loud. With any luck, Baba Yaga would never realize that they didn't have to depart from the same airport they arrived at.

Mother and Father drove them, and on the way, Mother sat in the back with Katerina, explaining the charms and talismans, spells and wards she had prepared. "I can't take any of these across the bridge," said Katerina.

"I know," Mother replied, "but I'd like you to live to reach the bridge."

She had made two of almost everything, so each was wearing one. The most important was the one she called Aware.

"I thought of making Suspicion for you both, but that just makes you jumpy and it would weaken your trust in each other. Also, she can nullify it if she has a strong enough Friend charm. So this is best. It's not very specific, but that's good, because we never know what she's going to throw at you."

Katerina held the little woven mat to her forehead and closed her eyes. "This is very strong," she said. "Very clever."

"Put it on," said Mother.

They hung the strings around their necks, letting the charms fall inside their clothing. "I hope I'm not allergic to any of the materials," said Ivan.

"I practice hypoallergenic magic," said Mother—in English, because she had no clue how to say it in proto-Slavonic. Of course, that only meant that Ivan had to spend a few frustrating minutes explaining the whole concept of allergies to Katerina so she wouldn't feel left out of the joke.

The last charm was one for Katerina alone. "I know this one," she said.

"It's called Little One," said Mother.

"Do I need it?" asked Katerina.

"Are you sure that you don't?" asked Mother.

Katerina put it on.

"What?" asked Ivan. "What is it and why don't I have one?"

Katerina laughed. "Is there a chance that you're pregnant?"

"You tell me," said Ivan. "I don't know which rules apply anymore."

"Magic has never improved on that," said Katerina.

"Nor on the method of conception," said Father. "Though I think we can safely say that science has done a better job of reducing the hazards of bearing children than magic ever did."

"Though science presents its own set of hazards," said Mother. It was an old argument between them, and it was settled this time with a wink and a grin.

Everything went smoothly at the airport. They weren't as familiar with Rochester, only using its airport occasionally to meet visitors who couldn't easily connect through Syracuse. So Ivan wasn't sure he'd recognize if Baba Yaga had altered anything. He was wearing Aware, but it didn't make him feel any sharper-witted than usual. Maybe that meant nothing unusual had happened; maybe it meant he was always so alert that magic couldn't improve on his normal abilities; or maybe it meant Baba Yaga was smarter than Mother. Ivan preferred to think that Baba Yaga was off in Syracuse, watching for them.

They checked in, but then waited in another gate area until their plane had been mostly boarded. Then they kissed and hugged and the women cried a little and Father held on to Ivan a little more than usual. They all knew this might be the last time they ever saw each other. They knew that if Ivan and Katerina got back to Taina and died there, the only hint of it would be when Mother failed to find Ivan's image in the blackwater bowl.

Ivan watched everything, even glancing into the pilots' cabin for a moment, though he had no clue how he'd know if anything were wrong. What did he expect to see, Baba Yaga herself, sitting in the pilot's seat and cackling madly, "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!" Come to think of it, she had gotten the little dog, even if it wasn't theirs.

They flew from Rochester to Kennedy without a hitch. Not even the turbulence that had marred the transatlantic flight before. Katerina already knew the rules about seatbelts and when to stow luggage. "You're getting to be an old hand at this," he said.

"I hope I get to use the skill many times in the future," she replied.

Ivan thought about this for a moment. "You mean you want to come back?"

"Don't you think our children should know your parents as well as they know mine?"

"If they can," said Ivan. "I didn't know you'd want to."

"Not like this," said Katerina. "Not watching out for the Widow all the time. But yes, they should fly through the air."

Kennedy was its normal nightmarish self, probably the worst airport Ivan ever flew through. It wasn't as bad leaving as it was arriving, which is rather like saying tuberculosis doesn't kill you as fast as pneumonia. There was the normal chaos and tumult at the gate, and the six-mile walk down tubes and ramps before they got to the airplanes, which apparently parked in Sag Harbor. Through it all, Ivan and Katerina watched everyone and everything that happened; but Ivan knew that it was primarily his responsibility, since he was the more experienced flyer and would be more likely to know if something was wrong.

The maddening thing was that they had no idea what they were looking for. Baba Yaga herself? She could look like anybody, or make herself unnoticeable. Some sabotage to the plane? As if either of them could tell! A passenger or crew member under Baba Yaga's spell? Maybe they could detect that. Or maybe not. They certainly hadn't guessed about Ruthie, and Ivan knew her well. He did notice that she was acting strange—in retrospect, the picnic was an absurd idea even if nothing had been booby-trapped. But Ivan had made allowances for her because he felt guilty. With strangers, guilt wouldn't be clouding the issue.

Ivan had thought first class was nice on the plane from Rochester—roomy seats, a better variety of snacks. As they settled into their places on the international flight, everything was so cushy Ivan began to wonder if the flight attendant planned to sing them to sleep. There were bags for their shoes, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and all kinds of completely useless amenities, including strange aromatherapy soaps and lotions. Katerina looked at them with suspicion, but after opening each one she pronounced them safe. "Except that they all smell as bad as a skunk," she said. Apparently perfume would be a tough sell in Taina.

"Look," said Ivan. "You push a button, and a thing comes out for you to rest your feet on."

Katerina loved it. But then she grew serious. "Look at us," she said. "How alert are we being now?"

"She's still in Tantalus or Syracuse," said Ivan. "We've lost her."

"No," said Katerina. "It's not that easy. Not with her." She unfastened her seatbelt and started to sidle past him to the aisle.

"Where are you going?" asked Ivan.

"To walk through the plane," she said. "To see if I notice anything."

"I'll come with you."

"No," she said. "One of us stays here to guard our place. So she can't leave a curse for us here."

"Then I'll walk the plane," said Ivan. "I'm more likely to notice if something is wrong."

She agreed. Ivan got up and walked back into coach. People were still boarding, but the crowd was thinner—most people were in their seats. At the back, Ivan scanned the lavatories. He even thought of lifting the toilet lids, and then laughed at himself for such an absurd idea—and then had to go in and lift every last one of them, because once he had thought of it, he had to do it, in case it was Aware that had caused him to pick up on some subliminal clue. Naturally, the toilets were normal—stained with blue fluid, in rooms so tiny that you had to be a ballet dancer to turn around. There was nothing wrong with them that hadn't started at the design phase.

"Is something wrong?" asked the flight attendant behind him.

"No," said Ivan. He came out of the bathroom.

"It's a good time to take your seat, sir," she said.

He was a little embarrassed, but now it felt all the more urgent to him that he check every toilet. Yet he had already checked every one of them, hadn't he?

On impulse, he asked the flight attendant, "How many lavatories are there back here?"

"Just here in the back?" she asked. "Six."

"That's funny," said Ivan. "I only counted five."

"You only need one at a time, anyway," she said with a smile.

"Really? Six?"

Humoring him, she pointed to them all in turn. "One, two, three, four, five. See?"

"OK," he said. It was clear she had no idea what she had just said.

He needed to get her out of the way. "Do I have time to use one?" he asked.

"If you're quick." She smiled her official smile—the one that said "You're an idiot but I'm paid to be nice to you"—and went back up the aisle, helping people settle in.

Ivan thought about what had just happened. Or tried to. His brain was a muddle, suddenly. She had said there were six bathrooms, hadn't she? He tried to count them. He placed a hand on each door and said the number. And he got to six, all right. But had he counted one of them twice? Had he touched every door?

And then he realized. It didn't matter where the missing bathroom was, or even if there was a bathroom missing. The flight attendant had said six and then counted five. He himself was confused about what was before his eyes. Maybe it was just nerves or carelessness. But maybe it wasn't. And Ivan wasn't taking any chances.

He walked briskly to the front of the plane. The flight attendant was about to close the door. "Wait," he said to her. "We're getting off."

"What? Why?" she demanded.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "We've decided not to go."

"You're going to delay the whole flight," she said. "We can't take off until we've found your luggage underneath and removed it."

"It doesn't matter. We're getting off."

He took a step toward first class to get Katerina, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the flight attendant resume closing the door. He whirled around. "If you close that door I'll sue the airline and you for kidnapping!"

"What are you talking about?" she said.

"I asked you not to close the door."

"I have to close the door. We can't take off unless we close the door."

Another flight attendant came up to him. "Sir, please take your seat now."

"I'm not flying on this plane! I'm getting off! I told her not to close the door, I have to get my wife. She doesn't speak English. We're not taking this flight."

"Of course, sir. Even though that will be an inconvenience to everyone else, since we have to wait while your luggage is unloaded, and—"

"The other flight attendant already explained that," said Ivan.

"Honestly," the first one said, "he never said a word about it to me."

To Ivan, the confusion, the forgetfulness—they were proof that he was absolutely right. There was magic on this plane, and he was not going to be in it when it took off. He couldn't walk away from the door of the plane or they would forget that he was leaving and close it—and he knew that once it closed, they would cite FAA regulations or some such nonsense and refuse to open it again. Yet he also was quite sure that if he sent one of them to get Katerina, she'd forget what she was doing before she got to Katerina's seat, or screw it up in some other way.

So he called out. Not Katerina's name, because there was a chance Baba Yaga, who was almost certainly hiding in a bathroom stall, could hear him. So he called, "Ruthie!" And again. And a third time, until finally Katerina turned around. He beckoned to her. She unfastened her seatbelt and came toward him. "Bring your things," he said, when she was close enough to hear a whisper. "Hurry."

She rushed back to their places, pulled everything out from under the seats, and came back. The whole time, Ivan had to keep saying, "My wife is coming, she's getting our things, please be patient, don't close the door." As long as he kept talking, they remembered that he was leaving. If he left a pause, they forgot everything and he had to start all over.

Only when they were physically off the plane, standing at the entrance, did the flight attendants finally recover their short-term memory. Now they were quite cold to him and Katerina. But despite all the folderol, the baggage compartment hadn't even been closed yet, and it took only a couple of minutes for one of the baggage handlers to return with the two small suitcases they had checked. Bags in hand, Ivan and Katerina hurried back along the ramp and the tunnel just far enough for the flight attendants to stop glaring at them and get back to business. There the two of them waited until the door of the plane closed. Then they quickly made their way back to the gate, where the clerk at the desk demanded an explanation of why they had changed their minds about the flight.

"I'm superstitious," Ivan finally said. "This didn't feel like a lucky plane to me."

"You realize that a report will be filed on this," said the clerk.

"I'm counting on it," said Ivan. "And now, would you be kind enough to book us on the next flight?''

"How will I know if it's lucky?" he said sarcastically.

"I'll tell you before takeoff," said Ivan.

Only then did Katerina get to ask him what it was that made him get off the plane. He tried to describe what happened at the lavatories, and to his relief, she agreed with him immediately. "You were right. It might not have been her, but if it was, that's just how you would feel. Confused."

"The frightening thing is how close I came to not even noticing it."

"You're not supposed to notice it. That's what the Widow's spells are all about."

"So was it Mother's Aware charm that did it?"

Katerina smiled. "Remember telling me about vaccinations? Well, when you don't get the disease, do you know whether it was the vaccination that saved you, or just that you never happened to catch it?"

Ivan grinned. "And to think you never even went to college."

When the tickets were changed to a flight two days later—the next day's flight was full—Ivan was faced with the problem of what to do in New York for two days. Not that he would mind holing up in a hotel with Katerina—in fact, that was his preferred solution—but he didn't have the money for it. So he did what every self-respecting young husband would have done in such a situation. He phoned his parents.

They told him to call back in fifteen minutes to find out where to pick up the money they were wiring. He and Katerina browsed around the shops. That's where they were when they began to notice airline personnel scurrying around quite urgently, and a buzz of conversation, knots of people jabbering about something. It was probably just Aware still working on him, Ivan thought. Until the clerk from the gate pointed out Ivan and Katerina to a couple of security guards, who approached quickly with their hands on their guns, ready to draw. "Ivan Smetski and Katerina Taina?" asked the one.

"Is there a problem here?" asked Ivan.

"We need to talk to the two of you," said the security guard. "Separately."

"Good luck," said Ivan. "My wife doesn't speak English."

"We'll get an interpreter."

"No you won't," said Ivan. "Because she speaks an obscure dialect of Russian, and I guarantee you that the only person in New York City who speaks it, besides her, is me."

It took an hour for them to believe him, and another half hour of intense questioning about why they left the plane. Katerina tried to ask him what was going on, but they were quick to stop any crosstalk between them. "You will only interpret what we ask and what she answers," the interrogator insisted.

Finally they explained why they were so intensely interested in Ivan and Katerina. The airplane that they had left just before takeoff lost radio contact over the ocean. It also disappeared from radar. A massive search was under way, and no debris had yet been found, but they were acting under the assumption that the plane had gone down. And the two people who got off in a rush at the last second were obviously the ones they were most anxious to talk to.

It solved the question of what they would do with their time in New York, at least for the first day. Once Ivan realized what was happening, he called his father, who contacted friends who arranged for a very high-powered attorney to be in attendance for the rest of the questioning. Ivan scarcely had a chance to learn the man's name, because once he was there, the questioning was pretty much over. Ivan and Katerina had both made their statements, Ivan faithfully translating all of Katerina's recollections, even when they differed from his in some detail or other. He figured that it was more plausible if they weren't completely in unison than if they were suspiciously identical. And since their checked bags had been removed from the plane, it was hard to see how they could have caused whatever the problem was.

And that was the clincher, as far as their attorney was concerned. "You don't even know what happened to the airplane, and here you are questioning these two honeymooners as if you had some evidence linking them to a bomb. You not only don't have a link, you don't even have a bomb."

As they were leaving the interview room for the last time, one of the men who had been fairly quiet until now stopped Ivan at the door. "Please," he said. "I know you didn't cause it. But you've got to admit, you're the luckiest person on that airplane. Why did you get off? What triggered it? It could help us to know what happened to the plane."

"Honestly," said Ivan, "it was just a feeling I had. Muddled. Confused. A sense that something was there that shouldn't be. If I had actually seen something, don't you think I would have warned the crew?"

All of which was true. And anything more he might have told the man, he wouldn't have believed anyway, so what was the point of that? There was a ninth-century witch in one of the bathrooms with a spell of unnoticeability on her, but I trumped it with my mother's charm of awareness.

Yeah, right.

Ivan was just glad that they couldn't make him take a lie-detector test, because he was sure he would have failed that miserably.

They got the money from Western Union, which made Ivan feel guilty, because his parents weren't exactly wealthy. Ivan didn't take Katerina into Manhattan. Instead they found a place farther out on Long Island. Not easy to do, since it was the height of the beach season. But if you stay far enough inland, the motels empty out a little.

They didn't stay in their room the whole time, though. Katerina needed the outdoors, and so did Ivan—he'd spent these past weeks cooped up in house or yard, unable to run every day for the first time in years. They felt safe from Baba Yaga, and so they went out, Ivan to run, Katerina to walk and enjoy the good weather. She tried to run alongside him at first, but she didn't see the pleasure in it. For her, fitness came naturally, from work, not from play.

In the park there were more kites, and Ivan remembered that he had wanted to learn how to make a hang glider. He found a couple of books on hang gliding in a store and figured he could read them during the rest of the trip.

At night, Ivan and Katerina speculated on what Baba Yaga had done to the plane. Ivan explained about how terrorists blew up planes sometimes, which made Katerina sick at heart to hear about it. "Like Attila the Hun," she said—for Attila was still the bugbear of tales to frighten children, in those centuries before the Mongols came. "Slaughtering everyone. Laying waste to everything."

"The Widow wouldn't do that?"

"Why would she? What would it accomplish? We weren't on the plane."

"Did she know we weren't on the plane?" asked Ivan.

"She was on the plane. She didn't blow it up."

"Then what happened to it?"

Katerina shrugged. "Maybe she took it home with her."

"Took it home? Passengers and all? What did she do, put it in a sack and sling it over her shoulder?"

"I don't know."

"We can't even take our clothes with us from one world to the other. She can take a 747?"

Katerina smiled thinly. "What the Widow wants, the Widow takes."

The next morning, the seventh of July, Ivan looked for the small carry-on bag that he had filled with reading material for the trip, along with a couple of gifts for Marek and Sophia. He wanted to add the hang-gliding books to the bag. But he couldn't find it anywhere.

Only then did he realize that Katerina had only gathered up their belongings from under the seats in front of theirs. She probably hadn't even seen him put that bag in the overhead compartment. And he had forgotten completely that it existed until this very moment.

For one horrible instant he wondered if Baba Yaga had somehow put a bomb in that bag, so that Ivan really had carried it onto the plane. But no, Katerina was right, it couldn't have been an explosion. The bag was just an oversight.

An oversight? "Katerina," he said, "shouldn't Aware have told me that I was leaving that bag on the plane?"

"Yes," she said, looking as worried as he felt. "But I didn't notice you put it in the overhead, or if I did I forgot—that shouldn't have happened, either."

"And I didn't remember it for two days. Just as well—if I'd thought of it while they were questioning us and blurted something out about leaving one little bag on the plane, they would never have let us go."

Katerina slipped Aware off and looked at it. "This has to be the charm that let you notice the Pretender was there, or at least notice that you were being kept from noticing. So why didn't it make us aware that we were leaving the bag?"

"It makes no sense for the Widow to let us go, but keep our bag," said Ivan.

"Maybe it does," said Katerina. "Tell me everything that was in the bag."

He sat down and methodically wrote down everything. Nothing offered the slightest clue as to what Baba Yaga might have wanted with the bag, until Ivan remembered one last item. "I put that message from Baba Tila in there, too," he said. "Along with the gifts for Marek and Sophia. Because I wanted to ask them about it."

Katerina thought about that for a few minutes. "So, whatever that message meant, the Pretender just took it to Taina."

"How did she even know I had it?" asked Ivan.

"Who says she did know?" said Katerina. "We still don't know who the message is for, or who it's from. It might have nothing to do with her. But if it's supposed to be delivered to somebody in Taina, putting it on a plane that the Widow took back with her is the only way it could ever be delivered. Since you and I certainly couldn't have taken it with us."

"So we're back to your theory that some fate is helping us."

"It makes me wonder if maybe we should have stayed on the plane."

"No," said Ivan. "Absolutely not. The Widow doesn't control the bridge. That's why we have to get to Taina that way. On the airplane, even if she took us there, we'd arrive as her prisoners."

"Yes, you're right," said Katerina.

"That bag I left on the plane, that message—I just hope it was some kindly fate helping us. Because if it wasn't, then the likeliest outcome is that my boneheaded blunder might cost us dearly somewhere along the line."

"Your blunder? Give me my share of the credit."

They went to the airport early. Some of the same clerks were on duty, watching Ivan and Katerina very carefully, but treating them with more politeness than usual, which, at Kennedy, isn't a hard standard to surpass. Ivan and Katerina were, for their part, just as careful as before, but this time there was no sign of danger, before and after they boarded the plane.

It began to look as though Katerina might be right, that Baba Yaga had disappeared right along with that first plane, back to the ninth century. Which meant that maybe they wouldn't have to worry again until they crossed the bridge.

They were so relaxed, they even slept on the flight. And when they finally got to Cousin Marek's house, exhausted from travel and from too much alertness, he confirmed it for them. "She's no longer in this world. But when she left, she didn't leave alone."

"So she took the passengers with her?" asked Ivan.

"They're all back there, where she is," said Marek. "Poor things."

"What can we do? How can we bring them back?"

"Two ways," said Marek. "First, you persuade old Yaga to send them back."

"All right, we'll do that," said Ivan.

Katerina looked at him as if he were insane.

"I was joking."

"What's the other way?" Katerina asked Cousin Marek.

"Break her power," said Marek.

"Bring me the broomstick of the Witch of the West," said Ivan.

"What?"

"A movie. The Wizard of Oz. The only way to break her power is to kill her, isn't it?"

Marek shrugged. "That would certainly work. But I can't tell you that it's the only way."

"Do you know of another?"

"I'm only a god, Vanya, not an expert."

With Baba Yaga no longer gunning for them, they didn't have quite the same urgency to get back. Whatever mischief she was doing in Taina, time flowed differently there from here, and so hurrying made no sense, if something could be gained by lingering.

And something could, Ivan hoped. Together Cousin Marek and Ivan and a couple of other farmers from the area worked on making a hang glider out of available wood—some seasoned lumber for the most rigid heart of the frame, but the rest springier, newer wood, thin wands of it. And tightly woven fabric—cotton for now, but rough linen would have to do, when they got to Taina. Unless they could find silk. Katerina remembered that she had once seen a length of imported silk. If it was still there, not cut up into too many smaller pieces, they might be able to use it.

They had sense enough not to make the test flights by jumping off cliffs, and after several tries, they were able to make a glider that worked. Katerina insisted on learning to fly it, too, and while neither of them became brilliant at it, they also didn't die, which was how you graduated from a do-it-yourself hang-gliding school, Ivan figured.

They knew all that they could think of that might be useful. They had done all they could think of to prepare and practice and plan. There was nothing but fear to hold them any longer, and so they decided, as one, that it was time to cross the bridge, this time as rulers of Taina, first to drive the usurpers out of power, and then to strike the blow that would set them free of Baba Yaga once and for all.

Or they'd die trying.

Baba Yaga

It was not until the house-that-flies was in the air that Baba Yaga ventured out of the bathroom to walk the aisles. She had had a shaky moment when the boy stood right outside the door of the restroom where she was hiding. The spells that his mother had prepared for him were powerful, and she could feel how the Aware spell struggled against her Oblivious. When he went away, though, she was sure he hadn't seen her. She only wished she could understand what they were saying.

Seats 2-A and 2-B. Empty.

Were they simply out of their seats? In the bathroom? Visiting the cockpit?

No and no. They had left the plane. They were nowhere on it.

Baba Yaga was filled with helpless rage. All of last night's work had been for nothing. She was sure Ivan had said they had their reservation, and yet their names were nowhere in the computers. Only when she redoubled the spell of helpfulness on the stupid weary ticket agent did he come up with the bright idea that maybe they had flown from a different airport.

Baba Yaga finally found their reservation—but not till they had already taken off from Rochester. As it was, she had to scramble to catch a Syracuse flight that would get her to Kennedy before they embarked on the transatlantic leg of their journey. She was angry that they had tricked her—not just that they had succeeded, but that they had dared to try—but they hadn't eluded her for long. It was the big transatlantic plane that she wanted, anyway.

Now to find that they had gotten off the flight was almost unbearable. She screamed and ranted all the way up and down the plane, spewing nauseating, annoying little curses between screeches. Nobody noticed her, of course, and all the spell-casting left her exhausted. She could barely sustain Shadow by the time she was done. But it didn't matter. In a few minutes she and the plane would be back in her own world—the world where Bear could replenish her strength whenever she needed. And casting the spell to bring it all home would be easy enough. She had the cloth already prepared, hadn't she? And sooner or later, Ivan and Katerina would return to Taina. It would have been nice to destroy them in Ivan's world, but in the end, destroying them in Taina would have the added benefit of demoralizing the entire population of Taina. It was really better this way. They had escaped one trap, but inevitably they would walk into another, sooner rather than later. And in Taina, there'd be no more interference from the mousy little witch Ivan called Mother.

When the seatbelt light went dark and people started moving around again, Baba Yaga began following one of the flight attendants around, filling her with wordless curiosity, along with images of the pilot as the man with the answers. And when the flight attendant finally went to the cockpit, Baba Yaga didn't have to understand English to know what was being said, for she was feeding the girl questions below the level of language.

"What is the head of the plane?" asked the flight attendant.

The pilot looked at her as if she were insane.

Baba Yaga cast Understanding on him, which in her weakened state didn't confer actual comprehension, but did make him listen attentively, setting aside biases and expectations that would have interfered. In the end, the pilot told her, "The thing that leads the plane is me, and the tool I use to do it is this." He pointed to the thing that looked something like a car steering wheel.

At once the flight attendant relaxed, then looked confused. "What am I doing up here? Did you want something?"

"No," said the pilot, laughing. "We didn't want anything."

"Then you shouldn't have called me," she said. She rushed out of the cockpit, embarrassed.

The pilot only had time to say "I think somebody's been hitting the bottle" before Baba Yaga, unnoticeable as ever, leaned over his shoulder and draped a small cloth over the control that he had indicated. Baba Yaga herself might be weak here, but the cloth had been given its power at a time when she had her full strength. It would do its work. The plane and everything in it would follow where the cloth took them.

Home.

One moment they were flying over the Atlantic, still not quite out of the sight of land. The next moment, they were in the air over the deep forest of western Rus'. The panic in the cockpit lasted only until Baba Yaga cast off Shadow and revealed herself. For in the transition from one world to the other, the power of Bear had flooded back into her. She felt like a girl again; all the weariness was gone. And now it was a simple matter to impose Understanding on the pilot, the crew, and all the passengers—not just openness, but real comprehension of every word she spoke, though not one of them spoke her language.

"I have brought you here. Take me to my kingdom!"

They seemed reluctant at first. Not until the copilot and several flight attendants were vomiting or dancing around insanely did the pilot really understand the kind of power he was dealing with. And the pilot didn't actually get cooperative until she had given him a crippling rectal itch, which he had no choice but to scratch at savagely, until finally he persuaded Baba Yaga that yes, he would take her wherever she wanted to go, and no, he would not make any more foolish demands about taking them back to Kennedy at once.

This was the primeval forest of Mother Russia. They circled around for many hours in search of a stretch of flat, treeless ground where a 747 could land. Finally the coming darkness of night forced a decision—a meadow that wasn't really long enough or level enough, but it was their only chance. Baba Yaga helped with the landing, making it smoother than they had any right to expect, and then stopping it quite abruptly before they ran into the forest edge. She was in her strength again, her powers filling her, her spells as potent as ever, and she rather enjoyed the pain and panic and injuries suffered by the passengers because of the sudden stop. What she cared about was keeping the flying house from being damaged by a collision. The people were here only because they happened to be in the airplane when she took it. Though the sound of shrieking and weeping was music to her ears.

As the sounds of pain and panic died down, Baba Yaga seized the microphone and, with the help of a vigorous new spell of Understanding, she announced to the entire plane, "You have reached your final destination."

After the meaning of her announcement had a chance to sink in, the crying and screaming started up again in earnest.