Deathless

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 creme. 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