nascent one not yet stirring within her, though already so hungry. She would recall that hunger, the only thing about her child she would ever know. (To this day, whenever she found herself in bustling Parisian brasseries, watching wealthy tourists abandon their uneaten baguette or cheese plates, it filled her with such a quick, intuitive anger that she would instinctively hiss maledictions at their heels.)
She could still recall stumbling upon that trace scent of food as she wandered, staggering, starving, and lost in the woods so many dawns ago. Venison, she had been sure it was venison, a thin fatty smell sneaking through the needled larch to find her. The faint aroma had caught her like a fish on a hook, pulling her step by step deeper into the forest until she finally came across the lone hut. Unlike in the fairy tales, the little house did not stand on chicken legs, but was raised instead on thick stilts of stunted birch. Stumbling out of the red twilit woods, Zoya kept her distance and quietly worked her way around the building, looking for any sign that she might be welcome. The hut was foreboding. Without any sign of a door or window, smoke crept out from the roof and sharp scratched lines of yellow light leaked out from the pitch-caulked cracks between the hut’s timbers. She thought she could make out a woman’s deep voice, either talking to herself or humming a tone-deaf tune. Zoya hid behind a thick patch of thistle, settling in, to wait for the owner to emerge. But all night and well into the next morning, no one came out. As she lay there, pains of famine now desperately screaming in her belly, Zoya dug and scratched at the earth, finally sucking on worms and beetles for moisture. Part of her wanted to bang on the cabin walls and beg for bread, water, and mercy, but another, stronger feeling urged her to stay where she was. So she kept waiting. But nobody came out. Instead, the aromatic scents from the cabin smoke grew deeper and richer; the air swam with the fragrances of clove, garlic, and ginger, all wrapped in the smells of simmering haunch fat and pinewood smoke. It was too much to bear. Drained now of all strength, Zoya collapsed flat against the earth, her tears turning the soil beneath her face to mud.
She slept there through the rest of the day. Then, late in the afternoon, as the sun began disappearing behind a wall of dark clouds, a flap on the lower edge of the cabin swung open with a hard bang. A baritone voice like a swamp bullfrog’s called out. “You, in the dirt there. Come inside now. It’s going to thunder.” Then another trap door popped open beneath the house, beside one of the cabin’s stilts. Crawling close, Zoya found that there were footholds carved into the side of the birch leg. She climbed up into the dark room. While its contents seemed wondrous at the time, it was no different from the other lairs Elga would stitch together again in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Riga, Ostrava, Kiev, and scores of other cities. There were rows of dead creatures, skinned and dried, earthen bowls of moldy bulbs and moss, stacks of fungi and gnarled roots stewing in open pots of luminous orange, pale gray, and olive green liquids. Volumes of loose-bound manuscripts, books, and papers were piled up, some pages torn out, hand-scratched and nailed to the rough walls. The small stone fireplace had a cracked chimney that the smoke leaked out of, making the atmosphere murky and hard to inhale. But the fire did kick out a strong heat, and Zoya was immediately drawn to its side while the old woman bolted tight the floor hatch behind her. Pulling up a stool, Elga sat down close to make a study of the girl.
“So, some villager told you about my home?”
Zoya shook her head no. Elga nodded. “You know who I am, then?”
Zoya shook her head again. Elga gave her a grin that was almost warm. “Well, you look hungry. I have good yarrow soup. Eat first, then we can talk.”
Along with the warm broth and vegetables, Elga served the girl the simple truthsayer recipe Zoya had long since memorized. It worked the way liquor does, only more so, and after an hour the old woman had pulled out the girl’s tale, her rape and abuse, her father’s death, her germinal child, all of it streaming from Zoya’s lips without a tear or a shiver. Every hardship of her life was reduced to batches of sounds that Zoya handed over to her hostess in exchange for more soup and a chance to stay by the warm fire.
When she was finished, Elga looked at her for a moment. “You would like help?”
Zoya solemnly nodded.
“Fine, fine,” the old woman said, clearing the empty soup bowl away. “I will help you, of course I am happy to, but it will cost you, and we must decide now how you will pay.”
“But I have nothing,” Zoya meekly replied.
Elga shook her finger at the young girl and her eyes flared. “We all can pay, girl, and you owe me too. You think soup comes free? I broke my back carrying that wood to burn in that fire. By any honest count, you already owe me more than you know.”
Zoya looked around, nervously realizing that she had trapped herself in a house with no windows and a locked door. “Please,” she pleaded, “I have nothing.”
“There, there, do not be so hard on yourself,” the old woman said, shifting her hard expression to a crafty smile. She reached out and softly stroked Zoya’s tearstained cheek. “Every soul with a breath has to pay someone for something. But do not fear, it will not be so bad. What, you think I want to hurt you? You believe those awful stories the village fathers tell their stupid children to keep them enslaved at home? ‘
Now, in the small Parisian apartment, methodically collecting the scattered owl pellets from the windowsill, Zoya reflected on what that exchange had, in truth, cost her. Elga had taken more than a little. The price staggered her mind and flooded her with dark emotion, so she tried, as she so often tried, to shove the thoughts away and shut a heavy door on the past. But she never could succeed for long, the memories always pushed their way through.
First, there had been the child buried in her belly. That decision was one she felt she had to make, but the memory lurked in her, a ghost that had never ceased to burn. Allergic to the past, whenever the recollection came it was so clear in her mind it caused her throat to constrict, making it hard to swallow. Only when she traced the memory thread along its twisted path, seeing again how stark her lack of choice had been, could she let go of the guilt and let herself breathe again. Elga had led her through the logic of that painful conclusion the very first night and then taken her through the bloody purging. The old woman nursed her to recovery in the days that followed, the ordeal creating a bond between the women, Zoya now feeling that there was one soul on earth looking out for her, while Elga observed the girl’s grit and strength and silently counted the ways her newfound friend could be of use.
Whenever the sharp regrets stabbed at her, Zoya reminded herself that the child she lost had been conceived in violence, a bloody curse that had followed her from that moment Grigori seized her in the bedroom until the night she screamed as Elga tore it from her body. Every good thing since then had been tinged with the red stain of that violence. Time was not absolute, and even without witchery she could travel right back to that instant, loom above it, and watch the last vestige of her simple humanity pulled out of her, a dark mark punctuating the end of so much innocence. She came up out of that bath a new creature with a new path and purpose, and with Elga’s guidance (which was always as twisted as a weed root in drought), Zoya began a course of action that had its own logic, rules, and blunt necessity.
As the season began to change, the two women had wrapped themselves up and begun journeying the cold roads together. They never returned to those woods. For decade upon decade they covered the breadth of the continent, rarely resting for long, a year here, a few months there. They went in all four directions, wherever loose fortunes and safe travel could be found. When armies advanced, they followed in the rear guard’s wake, sharing spoils as their luck held solid. They had more than a few narrow scrapes but had always managed to escape clean, packing up and making their tactical retreats, before any real pressure was brought to bear. They were generally careful and quick, looking for sparks of suspicion in observers’ eyes so that they could be gone long before the thought ever reached those watchers’ minds.
Their exits almost always coincided with funerals, and Zoya could count her victims the way Homer counted ships. Legions of soldiers, brokers, barons, bailiffs, and fools had all fallen before her. Murmured instructions into the ears of sleepy-eyed Arabian horses led cavalry lovers to broken necks, and she had coaxed the arc of battlefield bullets and the aim of cannons’ muzzles into many a cursed chest. Some farewells came with great repercussions—a fever sent up a sleeping vizier’s knobby spine had once brought a whole kingdom down—though most were simpler transitions, a few even humane, merely a touch of the unwanted slipped into their tea or a fumbling foot on a loose stair, sending masonry hard against the victim’s head.
No one had ever looked to her for explanation; if she was ever noticed, it was only as a discreet courtesan, a rumored inamorata, or a laughing, playful harlot, always so easily forgotten.
She did have a quiver of curses reserved to make the bad ones suffer, and the bullies and savage sadists
