“I will not tell them that you helped me. I have brought you something very precious to trade for one of your rushnyky.”
Witches appreciated it when you got straight down to business. The smile spreading on the haggard face confirmed that Baba Yagas were no exception to the rule.
“Ah. A trade. Why don’t you come in?”
“You know why.”
The smile now spread through all her wrinkles.
“Too bad,” she purred. “Your face would make a wonderful addition to my wall.”
Jacob counted more than a dozen faces among the carved flowers and birds. One of them looked familiar. It looked like a treasure hunter he’d known, a greedy fool who’d enjoyed feeding Heinzel to his wolfhound. What had he tried to steal from the Baba Yaga? One of her magic eggs? The hen that laid them? Or had he been after the same woven magic Jacob had come for?
The Baba Yaga raised a bony arm, and one of the carved birds flew off the wall. It was a raven. Its feathers turned black in flight. It dug its claws into Jacob’s head and began to pick at his skull as if it wanted to drive out his thoughts. Not a pleasant feeling. Then the raven flew to its mistress’ shoulder and pushed its beak into her ear. Its caws sounded like an old man’s whispers.
“So you don’t want the rushnyk for yourself?”
The rustling through the surrounding woods sounded as though the trees themselves were impressed by such selflessness.
“No. I need it for a friend.”
The Baba Yaga squinted as if to see more clearly. “So show me what you have.”
The red eyes widened with desire as Jacob pulled the fur dress from his backpack.
“Oh yes,” she whispered. “Now, there is one dress that could compete even with mine.”
She leaned over the fence and held out a hand. “You smell strange,” she said. “As though you’ve come from far away.”
“Very far.” Jacob dodged the outstretched hand. “You know what happens if you take this dress by force.”
“You’re right. That would indeed be a pity. I will be right back.”
The Baba Yaga turned and went to her house. She used the door this time, and was humming to herself as she stepped inside.
She stayed for an eternity.
All the while, the raven kept staring at Jacob from the roof.
When its mistress finally appeared in the doorway again, she was holding a cloth that was even more richly embroidered than her dress.
“It will hide you from your enemies, did you know?” she asked as she approached the fence. “Even from those ancient ones the Fairies banished into trees. My cloth makes them all blind.”
With his right hand Jacob reached for the rushnyk while his left lifted the fur dress across the fence. He had to recall Fox’s silver face to stop himself from pulling back at the last moment. As the Baba Yaga tucked the dress under her thin arm and hobbled back to her house, Jacob felt as if he’d sold Fox’s soul. There is no other way. He repeated it to himself, again and again, as he retraced his steps back to the clearing where Chanute and Sylvain were waiting. It seemed forever before he finally saw the flickering of their fire between the trees.
The Colors of the Baba Yaga
Fox was lying as if she hadn’t moved at all, trapped in her own flesh. Chanute had cut open her silvered clothes so the warmth of the fire could reach her skin, and he’d covered her with the old blanket he took on his travels. (Jacob had always suspected it was the gift of some long-lost love.)
“Go on, turn around!” Chanute barked at Sylvain before Jacob wrapped Fox’s silver body in the Baba Yaga’s cloth. Sylvain obeyed silently. He had tears in his eyes and seemed to have run out of expletives.
Please! Jacob wasn’t sure whom he was appealing to. He didn’t believe in the ghosts and gods to whom the people behind the mirror addressed their pleas. But Fox did. He stroked her hardened hair.
Please!
And, yes, she was going to shoot him when she found out what he’d traded for the rushnyk. Or even worse—she was never going to look at him again.
Chanute knelt down next to him.
“If she wakes up—” He cleared his throat. “I mean, watching you two is such torture. You should stop fooling yourselves. Damn, even that beardless girl-face Ludovik Rensman has shown more nerve than you.”
“What’s that got to do with nerve?” Jacob hissed back. “I have my reasons. We are friends—isn’t that enough? And now mind your own business. Did I ever say you should’ve proposed to that actress instead of having her face tattooed on your chest?”
Chanute rubbed his ugly face. “Oh, I did propose. Many times. She didn’t want me.” Her photograph was still in his room. Eleonora Dunsteadt. Not a particularly gifted actress—Jacob had seen her onstage in Albion—but she had an army of admirers.
The Baba Yaga’s patterns were beginning to stitch themselves into Fox’s silver brow.
She would find another. Or he would find someone for her. Another... As if the very thought doesn’t make you sick, Jacob. Still, it was good to speak of her as though she could answer them, frown at them like she did when she was angry with them.
If she wakes up.
She had to wake up.
“You’re made for each other! Even Sylvain says so.” Once Chanute got to talking, you’d have more luck trying to silence a Gold-Raven.
“Leave it! It is impossible!” Jacob didn’t want to talk about Spieler’s price, or about the fight he and Fox had over it.
“I see. Jacob Reckless is being his mysterious self again!” Chanute sulked and went to Sylvain, who was crouched despondently under a tree.
The hours went by, and the Baba Yaga’s embroidery danced over the Alderelf’s silver. Flowers, trees, mountains, moons, and stars… Jacob lost himself in the rushnyk’s images until a sigh made him look up. Fox’s lips had opened a little, like a blossom greeting the morning dew.
“Chanute!”
The old man nearly stumbled over his own feet as he rushed to Fox’s side. Sylvain looked after him in disbelief.
Chanute poured Alma’s potion into Fox’s mouth with unexpected tenderness.
Jacob got up, his limbs still stiff and heavy. He looked up at the trees. It was getting dark. The best time to visit a Witch’s house, in the East just like in the West. Witches were rarely at home while the moon was high.
“When she wakes up, tell her something,” he said to Chanute. “Tell her I’m following Will’s trail, tell her I’m—tell her anything, but don’t let her follow me.”
Chanute lumbered to his feet. “You can’t get the dress back!” He knew Jacob too well. “It’s suicide. Fox will get over it.”
No, she would not. Ever. He had given away her soul. How could she live without it?
The Forgotten Moth
The river was so wide! Nerron felt like vomiting. The wheels of the carriage had carved deep ruts into the damp earth, and they led straight into the water. Nothing proved Kami’en’s fearlessness like his choice of lover. He’d brought the Goyl’s greatest fear into his bed: a woman born of water.
The Fairy had left more than the tracks and the remnants of her moths’ web in those young willow trees. There were corpses spread along the river for miles. Men with slashed skins and faces, as if a terrible hailstorm had sliced them up. A very precious hailstorm...Nerron leaned over one of the dead bodies and picked a couple of diamonds from his wet hair.
“Are you still sure you want me to find the Fairy for you?”
Will looked at the corpses and nodded. Maybe the sight reminded him of the massacre in the cathedral. He’d heard the Fairy’s moths had killed more than three hundred humans there. Nerron carefully scanned the area, but he couldn’t see their travel companions. Which was not to say they weren’t there. Nerron was certain Will had no idea of their existence. But Nerron had the dubious privilege of Seventeen showing himself to him regularly. Things were going too slowly for the Mirrorling; Will and Nerron kept eating and resting t
oo much, which were clearly needs Seventeen did not have. But the Fairy was traveling fast. They weren’t gaining on her at all, and Nerron didn’t need some mirrored face to tell him how sluggishly this hunt was progressing.
He would have loved to ask the Pup about Seventeen’s maker. Nerron would’ve bet his speckled skin that Will had met him and was here at his behest. But Seventeen wouldn’t like such questions, and Nerron didn’t feel any desire to end like that silvered fly. So he kept on playing the part of the obedient stoneface, following wheel tracks, and daydreaming about melting Sixteen and Seventeen into a set of goblets in which he’d serve Goyl wine. Yesterday the milk-faced Pup had interrupted one of these fantasies by asking Nerron whether he believed in true love. “What’s that glass girl doing to you at night?” Nerron had wanted to reply. “Is she making you dream of a different one each time? She’s got enough faces for it.”
True love. The Pup looked as guilty as if he’d robbed at least three princesses of their virtue. Nerron couldn’t make sense of him.
But each time the temptation to ask Will more about his mission became almost too strong to resist, Nerron would feel the air around him warm and he believed he could feel Seventeen’s silver fingers around his neck.
He was wasting too much thought on Milk-face. He’d get used to him, like he’d gotten used to the tame salamander he’d once owned. Those puppy eyes were not going to make him forget whose brother he was.
Damn.
It didn’t matter what Milk-face was taking to the Fairy. It didn’t matter why the Mirrorlings were watching over him. His brother had stolen from Nerron, and the Bastard wanted his revenge. He played the guide because eventually he’d guide Milk-face to the slaughter, just as he’d done before with magic calves, enchanted doves, and speaking fish. Who cared if his clients had cut their hearts out, or their speaking tongues? Nerron would’ve taken any bet that Sixteen and Seventeen had similarly gruesome plans for the boy. Revenge. Fame. Wealth. That’s what kept the Bastard going. In that order. And to top it all off, a brand-new world.
The only thing Nerron found disquieting was how often he had to repeat that to himself.
Maybe it helped to picture it. Every time the Pup annoyed him with his kindness, Nerron imagined how much he could make off him at one of the illegal Ogre markets, or how he would throw him into one of the lava traps the onyx used to roast their enemies alive.
“How do you think she crossed the river?”
Just as well the little choirboy wasn’t half as good at reading stone faces as Nerron was at reading his.
“She drove over the water, how else? Did she never do that when you were guarding her lover? While you had a decent skin on you?”
How the Pup looked at him every time Nerron stopped coddling him. As though the boy thought he’d turned into an Ogre.
Lava traps, Nerron, meat markets.
“Do you know where the nearest bridge is?”
“Bridge? Goyl don’t need bridges.”
The Pup didn’t seem to remember the Goyl’s fear of water. Nerron sometimes thought he was like a grub who’d forgotten he’d once been a butterfly.
Something glinted in the sunlight by the riverbank. Ah. There they were. Half mud, half river, the sky in their many faces. Nerron was getting better at spotting the Mirrorlings. Sometimes they mirrored what was behind them, sometimes what was in front, and sometimes the images were as haphazard as their faces. They kept away not only from the willows and the remnants of the Fairy’s net but also from the river. Nerron suspected they disliked the water as much as he.
He would show them why they needed a Goyl.
He found the nearest tunnel barely a mile south from where the Fairy had killed the Cossacks. Mosaics by the entrance showed lizards and bats. Their style indicated that the tunnel was close to a thousand years old. The Goyl’s fear of the water was older than most human bridges, and in this area, their tunnel networks were particularly dense because their lost cities lay east of here. The largest one was supposedly built entirely of malachite. Nerron’s mother had told him about it whenever he’d felt ashamed of the speckles in his onyx skin. She’d described it in such detail that he’d begun to believe he’d seen it with his own eyes. One day...
Most humans hesitated before entering a tunnel, especially one as steep as this one. But not Will Reckless. He disappeared into it without even waiting for Nerron. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten everything after all.
The Mirrorlings probably needed neither tunnels nor bridges.
All Lost
She was made all of colors. They patterned her skin, her bones. Red. Green. Yellow. Blue. Fox opened her eyes. The fabric on her skin felt almost as warm as her fur.
Someone was leaning over her.
Chanute. What was he doing here? Where was she?
Sylvain was standing next to Chanute. “Your servant, ma jolie.” ...her thoughts took strange paths, as though they weren’t her own.
“Welcome back!” Chanute stroked her face so gently that for a moment she felt like a child again. He had tears in his eyes, which was a very unusual sight. What had happened? She felt like she’d been sleeping for a hundred years.
“Bring her clothes, Sylvain!” said Chanute. “There are some in her saddlebag.”
Her clothes... Only now did Fox realize she was naked beneath the colorful cloth. She drew it closer around her and sat up. Sylvain looked very embarrassed and averted his eyes as he handed her the spare clothes. What had happened to her normal ones? And where was Jacob? She looked around. He’d been with her, hadn’t he? And then the images came. Terrible images: a figure, human and not, beautiful and terrible, the hand on her face, like hot metal, Jacob’s scream.
Where was he?
“Albert,where’s Jacob?”
Chanute grunted and began to load his revolver. Not an easy task with just one hand.
“Accouche qu’on baptise!” Sylvain grabbed the weapon and the bullets. “Tell her already. She’s going to find out. She’s smarter than the three of us combined.”
Fox looked down at the cloth. She saw the birds, the flowers. The magic embroidery of a rushnyk. Hard to find, and even harder to afford.
“Where is he, Albert?”
Chanute always looked like a schoolboy when he was called by his first name.
“Albert!”
“Yes, yes, fine,” he grumbled, taking the loaded pistol from Sylvain. “I’ll go and look. But you wait here.”
Sylvain shot a glance at Fox’s horse. Fox knew, even before she reached into the saddlebag. The fur dress and Jacob... The two things in her life she could never lose. Gone. The woods surrounding her seemed like the darkest place she’d ever seen.
“He went back to her?” There it was, that familiar fear, love’s terrible price. “How could you let him go?” she screeched at Chanute.
“And how should we have stopped him?” he barked back. Sylvain looked like a whipped dog. Like someone who knew how it felt to lose his most precious possession.
***
Jacob had covered his tracks so they couldn’t follow him. But Fox had watched him do it often enough. She no longer felt any of the silver inside her. To the contrary, she felt reborn, which she probably owed to the cloth. The slope soon became so steep that the horses refused to go on. They let the horses go, for they couldn’t be certain they’d be coming back the same way. The carpet of pine needles made way to rotting leaves and black earth. Fox was following Jacob’s trail so swiftly she soon heard Chanute panting behind her. Sylvain, however, kept up easily, as though he’d known these woods since childhood.
“Ah, merveilleuse!” Fox heard him whisper. Even she’d never seen woods older than this one. Some of the trees could’ve housed whole villages in their crowns, and it soon grew so dark under the leafy canopy that Chanute and Sylvain had to follow their ears more than their eyes.
A scream.
Fox stopped. She couldn’t be sure if it came from a woman or a bird.
&nbs
p; “Ah, she’s angry!” Chanute whispered behind her. “That is good. Or very bad.”
When Fox asked him whether he’d ever met a Baba Yaga, he spat. “A Witch is a Witch,” he growled. “I know how to handle them.”
But Fox had heard differently. If Jacob was to be believed, whenever they’d had to deal with a Witch, Chanute had sent Jacob on ahead.
The fence of skulls appeared behind the trees. They were glowing like lanterns.
“Tabarnak! Like pumpkins on Halloween!” Sylvain looked enchanted, as though he’d never seen anything more beautiful.
No, Jacob’s skull was not among them. These skulls were weathered and probably many years old. “Hundreds of years,” the vixen whispered. It was a comfort to still hear her voice. When would she leave if the dress was lost? Who would she be without her voice, her cunning, her daring? Celeste. Just Celeste.
The hut behind the fence looked menacing and beautiful. Fox had heard that birds that were foolish enough to land on its roof in search of insects immediately turned to wood. Judging from the faces in the walls, humans met a similar fate if they came too close. Fox didn’t see Jacob’s face among the carvings, but that didn’t mean anything. She was only looking at the front of the hut, which also meant the Baba Yaga must have noticed them coming.
Chanute signaled to Sylvain. Fox shook her head, but of course Chanute took no notice. The skulls spewed flames from their eyes and mouths as soon as the two men approached the fence. All Witches were sisters of fire. Chanute stumbled back, cursing. He shot the skull next to the gate to pieces. Sylvain smashed another with a branch. The skull set his shirt on fire as it shattered, but Chanute smothered the flames with his jacket and dragged Sylvain back under the cover of the trees.
Fools! Fox cursed them both, though she knew it was only fear for Jacob that had made Chanute act so carelessly. “Well done!” she hissed. “If Jacob’s still alive, then you’ve just given the Baba Yaga a reason to change that. I’m going in alone, and don’t you dare follow me.”