The door shut behind her. Bony fingers helped brush the snow from Cat’s hair and shoulders. The lambswool slipped to the floor; Cat kept hold of the knotted apron.
“First, let’s wrench off those frozen stockings, or the meat on your bones will be spoiled rotten.” The old woman came around from behind. Her head was astoundingly large for such a thin, twiggy body. Cat didn’t know how her shoulders and spine could support such a monstrosity of a skull. But that smile, thin-lipped and broad, was madly convincing. “You’ll want some tea at once. Some soup to follow, and some bread. What’s your name, and what drove you to my door?”
“Cat,” she replied, and the one word seemed to answer both questions at once. “May I have the honor of knowing the name of my hostess?”
“I should have thought everyone knew me already,” said the old woman.
“You’re so vain,” said the kitten. It was a yellow scrap of a thing, and its ribs showed. It began to leap about, trying to bat at a hummingbird who was taunting it. Cat had never seen a hummingbird inside a house before.
“I’ve been walking. I don’t recall that I’ve met you before. Perhaps I caught a touch of fever,” said Cat. “I’m imagining things.”
“Dreadful habit. The imagination is a curse and must be removed, like an eyelash in the soup.”
Cat sat down suddenly on a carven bench. The old woman squatted and grunted and pulled off Cat’s shoes. They were ruined. The stockings, too. “You’ll want to warm up those piglings,” she said. “Look how nasty they are, all white and pink and crunchy with the cold. I prefer them at room temperature. Come, my child, lean into the warmth.” The little old woman took hold of the bench and yanked with surprising strength. Cat found herself in front of a ziggurat of a wall stove in the corner, ceramic tiles lining it from floor to slanted ceiling.
“Oh, lovely,” said Cat.
“Thank you. I admit, I’ve kept my figure, after all these years, but I’m pleased you still notice.”
Cat turned again. The woman was preening with a hand on her hip and another stroking that chin, so prominent as nearly to be exoskeletal. “I can’t possibly have met you before,” said Cat. “Can I?”
“Nothing’s impossible,” said the old woman. “I get around.”
“But who are you?”
“I should have thought you knew, honeybucket! Why, Baba Yaga, the very same.”
She is an insane old woman, thought Cat, but at least I’m safe in the warmth, and she knows how to cook. The old woman was ladling pink broth into a bowl whose sides were etched with obscure runes. “Drink up, my dear. I find borscht a wonderful marinade when applied from the inside.”
“I’m as hungry as sin, but I find I’m not ready to dine,” said Cat. Her words surprised her. She was ravenous, nothing less.
“You’re not more clever than you are hungry, or you’re the rare child, indeed. Sip up the soup.”
Cat demurred and said, “Who are you really?”
“I’m Queen Victoria. I’m Nellie Bly. I’m Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean — what difference does it make? I’m hungry and I want to eat, so do my bidding.”
“I couldn’t dare take your supper. I have nothing to pay you with.”
“You’re not taking my supper, you’re supplying it.”
Cat sat up. She realized she was in grave danger from this old coot, who was at the very least deluded.
“Don’t worry about the soup,” remarked the kitten, getting up and stretching in front of the fire. “It’s only lightly poisoned.”
“The mouth on him! The mouth on you, Mewster,” said the old woman cheerfully. “For that, you get squat for yummers, and double squat for afters.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Cat. Her spoon went plonk in the untasted soup. “You’re playing with me.”
“Ah, I do play, but only for the higher stakes,” said the old woman pretending to be Baba Yaga. “What’s that great rutabaga you’ve been clutching since you arrived? It must be valuable if you haven’t set it down.”
“If you give me back my stockings and shoes and my coat and let me go,” said Cat, “it’s yours.”
“A present?” The voice turned gruff, suspicious. The eyelids of the old woman narrowed, the purple irises darted. “That’s a novelty. Give it here. I want to see what kind of bargain you’re driving.”
Cat unwrapped the Fabergé egg meant for the Tsar. She handed it over. It hadn’t suffered a scratch or a fracture, as far as she could see. Every figurine and filigree, every jeweled inch and scrap of gilded appliqué glittered in the light of the stove. The old woman: “Oh, look, the Firebird. Spirit of All the Russias. Ha! It looks like a canary wearing wing extensions.”
“Just because you favor feather boas …” mewed the kitten.
The witch — as Cat was beginning to imagine her to be — turned the egg. “And second, let’s see, who do we have? Saint Nicholas? Kublai Khan? Or maybe his aunt Gerdie?” The witch peered. “No, it’s the ice-dragon, of all things. Hardly a reputation to equal the Firebird’s. Or mine.”
“Look, there you are,” said the kitten, pointing a paw at the final opening.
“How cheap. I’m much prettier than that. And I’ve taken better care of my hair. I give this a two out of three. Thanks for the tchotchke.” She tossed it in the air.
“No!” cried Cat. But the egg didn’t fall and smash. It drifted in an updraft. Relaxed as smoke, revolving like a little local moon. The old woman flexed a forefinger. Come, come. From a rafter descended a broad and ancient bird’s nest — floating in the air, without cords or pulleys. The Fabergé egg settled in the hummock of straw and string and whatnot.
“Oh,” said Cat. “That’s a fine trick, better than anything I’ve seen on the stage.”
“I don’t do tricks,” said Baba Yaga.
“I thought you were out of your mind, but it’s me. I am out of my own mind.” She felt oddly calm as she said this. “I’ve stepped sideways out of life.”
“I am life,” Baba Yaga corrected her. “You’ve stepped nearer. For good or for ill, for inspiration or for indigestion, I don’t know yet. We’ll see how you get on.”
Sideways out of life, Cat had said. This applied to how Elena felt, too. She held all the possibility of happiness in the crook of her arm. It retained a remote warmth, that cinder egg. More leathery than ceramic to the touch. Hefty, if dull to look at — the color of first flame from paper.
She would have it, she would have it: she would have that wish. She would keep the Firebird’s egg safe in the box on the train. Under her bed. She merely had to wait. Hoard the egg until it was ready to hatch. Keep her thumb and forefinger primed for pinching its tail and making a wish.
She had a reason to return to this stolen life. To that carved box under the bed, that little private chamber with the locking door. But what if the train had left? Between some trees, around a turn in the tracks ahead, she saw the train, paused, still waiting. As if for her. She was the center of her own life, still, but her life was getting bigger.
Maybe the engine had just overheated. In any case, Elena hurried toward where it stood, steaming in the dawn cold. The butler and the governess huddled a few feet from the door, conferring in whispers, faces close.
Something interesting then happened that made Elena feel she was only now waking from a dream. The ordinariness of it: Miss Bristol shivering in a coat thrown on over her nightgown, that neat Monsieur d’Amboise with his shirttails out and his hair a thicket. She almost doubted what she had just witnessed: the Firebird’s immolation. I’m not the kind of person who gets her wish to come true, she thought. I’m the other sort. I have to make my own way. Don’t I?
She shifted the egg from one arm to another; it seemed faintly cooler.
When they saw her, they paused. Miss Bristol put a forefinger to her lips.
“The most amazing thing happened,” Elena started to say.
“Get on board the train before Sophia Borisovna Orlova wakes up and
sees you,” hissed Miss Bristol.
“But I saw an extraordinary thing. You won’t believe it.”
“You won’t believe the inside of a prison. Child, you imperil all of us. Miss Bristol has told me everything.” Monsieur d’Amboise’s enunciation so keen that his words almost left knife marks in the air. “Quickly now.”
She struggled to keep the Firebird’s egg safe as she was lifted into the train carriage. They hustled her down the passageway to the room adjacent Miss Bristol’s — her room, Cat’s room. Her room. They followed and closed the door with seditious gentleness.
Monsieur d’Amboise: “I want to know who your accomplices are. Your scheme, your ransom price. Everything.”
“I’m not smart enough to have a scheme.” Elena explained to them how she and Cat had changed places accidentally. “I don’t know if the fancy party gift smashed as Cat rolled out the door with it, but it doesn’t matter now: I have a replacement. It’s an even more wonderful gift for the Tsar than something expensive from London.” She held up her boon. She saw in their expressions that they were thinking, A big ugly egg. So what? “The egg laid by the Firebird in his moment of dying,” she explained.
“What tosh,” said Miss Bristol. “I never.”
“There’s no such thing as a Firebird,” added the butler. “That’s only a woodland find of no significance. Though how you’ve made it glow, I can’t imagine. Some peasant trick having to do with grease, no doubt.”
“There is a Firebird. Or there was,” said Elena. But now, back in the architecture of authority, she doubted herself. So does the magic world tiptoe away from us while we quibble and fret. “There must be a new Firebird waiting to be born in this egg,” she continued. “Really. We have to keep it safe. When Cat rejoins us, she can present this to the Tsar. Whatever else he has in his treasury, he can’t have something as magical as this. A magic thing belongs to royalty.”
“Give me that,” said Miss Bristol. Elena would not. She stooped down and pulled from under Cat’s bed the bespoke box that had held the Fabergé egg. The lid closed neatly upon the plain old egg from the wilds of dawn, boxing it in the dark.
“And now,” said Monsieur d’Amboise, “we must plan. Listen, Mademoiselle Faux-Ekaterina. The justice of Russian princes and boyars isn’t known for its mercy. The past few days spell disaster for all of us — for you, for your village, for Miss Bristol, and for me. We’ll be accused of conspiring with villagers to kidnap Mademoiselle Ekaterina and to steal the gift made for the Tsar. We’ll be thrown into prison.”
“Or worse,” said Miss Bristol.
“Our only hope is to continue the fiction that you are Mademoiselle Ekaterina until we arrive in Saint Petersburg. There, Miss Bristol and I can escape into the crowd and try to make it out of the country to Sweden before our absence is discovered. You have ruined our professional lives.”
“Also my digestion,” said Miss Bristol.
“Therefore, you are going to continue on this train to Saint Petersburg. You are going to continue to visit Madame Sophia, pretending to be Mademoiselle Ekaterina. With a cold. You’ve already convinced her so well that we never guessed the substitution. I suspect you’ve purloined her glasses, by the way. It wasn’t necessary; she’s nearly blind as it is. The lenses are a fiction of competence for her. You may return them without fear of discovery.”
“But why don’t we turn the train around, even now, and go rescue Cat?”
And to think Elena had once taken the butler for the Tsar! Now he looked stricken. Uncertain. There was feeling for Cat in his face, and in Miss Bristol’s, too. But cloaked by sharper apprehensions. “It is too late to turn back,” said Monsieur d’Amboise. “Your villagers will have killed Mademoiselle Ekaterina and stolen the egg.”
“That’s outrageous.”
“I heard the muttering in Miersk. The starving lose all sense of proportion. I speak,” he added, “from experience.”
“You’re wrong. They’d protect Cat. Grandmother Onna would cut a raisin in half to share it. The doctor will do everything to return her to you.”
“Let them prove their goodness. Now, listen, child, you don’t understand anything about the Russian suspicion of foreigners. Miss Bristol and I are from England and from France, respectively. We’re here on sufferance as it is. If Cat’s disappearance is discovered — when it is discovered — we will, at least, be deemed criminally negligent in not having noticed the switch before this morning. More likely, we’ll be considered accomplices in the loss of that precious, idiotic item. As it was intended for the Tsar, made for the Tsar, its theft would amount to a theft from the Tsar’s coffers.”
“Plip-plop, we’ve stolen a trinket. Chip-chop, off with our heads!” sang out Miss Bristol. Her eyes were running.
“As I say,” continued the butler, “we are ruined. But perhaps we may escape abroad instead of dying in a work camp in Siberia.”
“You have confidence in no one,” said Elena. “The doctor will declare it Save Ekaterina Day. Or Cat will be following the train tracks. Just as I was thinking of doing. She’ll catch up with us. She’ll return the Fabergé egg, if it’s still intact. Then we can exchange places. Madame Sophia will never know. All will be well.”
She was not sure how much of this she believed. She was only saying it.
“Your doctor fellow cannot heal this wound. And Cat is not that competent,” said Miss Bristol. “Oh, my poor girl, lost in the wilds of some misbegotten oblast. I cannot allow myself to think of it. Or of the misery she has brought upon us. She is irresponsible, headstrong, unmoored.”
“She is lost. And you, Mademoiselle Serf, are a fool,” said Monsieur d’Amboise, nearly kicking the box with the Firebird’s egg in it.
“And have I mentioned that we are doomed?” said the governess.
The butler turned away from Elena. Over his shoulder: “And so are you.”
So you see I am trying to keep my comments to myself. I don’t always manage. Although I have been known to find girl-children tiresome, something about these two captivates me. Is it because they have both become prisoners, and I’m alert to that hardship? Cat is trapped in a folktale she never believed in. Elena is caught in a web of wealth and luxury that seemed to her more fantastic than magic.
I might say here that I don’t pretend to understand everything the witch says. Her references are often obscure. I suspect stratagems of a darker magic, codes of enchantment in her remarks. I present what I deduce to have happened, communing with my dead eye through the visions of birds. Perhaps I am an unreliable scribe. In any case, here we are, back in the woods.
The witch inched toward Cat, indicating the borscht, and said, “You’re not going to drink the Kool-Aid?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have to leave. Thank you for letting me warm up.”
“I wouldn’t hear of your leaving in this weather! It’s a blizzard out there, honeybucket,” said Baba Yaga. She put a bony hand on the drapes and pushed them aside. A wind picked up as if on demand. Out of the black night, a swirl of flakes smacked the window. Icicles formed on the casements as they watched, growing a foot long in a matter of seconds.
Iron bars on a prison cell, thought Cat. “If you harm me, they will come after you. They are looking for me even as we speak.”
“They? They? Who they? All the Cossacks and hussars and Tartars and Mongols and Georgians the great motherland of Russia can muster? All the schoolmarms of the land, with their rulers and their little iron bells? Maybe all the singing little rabbits and squirrels of the woods? Get real, child. No one finds Baba Yaga without her invitation. Not until she sends her familiar to chase them in. Right, Mewster?”
“Meow,” said the kitten. His face suddenly ballooned up, turning into the head of the feline brute that had threatened Cat. The girl shrieked, fell backward off the bench.
“My great-aunt,” said the girl. “She’ll save me.” It was hard to imagine Madame Sophia getting out of her chair without help
. “Or the villagers from Miersk, where we stopped. They took an interest in me.” That was true enough.
“Miersk? That greasy squattlehold? I’ve had truck with folks from Miersk before. Pifflestew. Now, you shut up for a moment. I lit up my welcome lights for you. I offered you soup. I said funny things to amuse you. Enough. It’s time for my supper. I can see you’ve been plumped up on Parisian pastries and British cream teas, and that’s fine. I’d have preferred a hot pastrami on rye, but I’ll settle for a steak-and-kiddo pie.” She reached into the rafters and withdrew a broad, curved knife with toothy serration. It looked capable of sawing through skin and bone.
“Those were the heads of real children on that bridge,” said the kitten. “And you thought they were holiday decorations of some sort.”
“Yes, like All Hallows’ Eve in London, or Hallowe’en, as they call it in the Benighted States of America!” The witch cackled, a horrible sound you might hear in an asylum of unseated minds. “Come here, my ambulatory cutlet, my sanguine savory, my sentient supper. It’s time for munchies.” She whisked the knife above her head like a saber.
“Of course, like me, those children didn’t bring you a present,” observed Mewster. “This one did. I don’t imagine you’ve forgotten the custom?”
“Getting legalistic, are we?” But the witch paused, picking at her iron teeth with the scimitar. And then they all heard a sound you might describe as the crack of dawn, if the cracking of dawn could mean that the dome of the sky had been struck from above with a sword mightier than the witch’s.
The hut tumbled over onto its side. Cat rolled up against a wall with her knees in her face. Baba Yaga fell on her sword, but it didn’t hurt her. “What in the devil’s handbag?” She pulled the sword out of her leg. “Mewster, what’s happened?”
“Meow don’t know,” said the kitten in a fake little child’s tone.
“What’s that horrid light?” The witch rolled around until she found her feet at last. A wall had become the new ceiling. Its window was now a kind of skylight, no longer showing blizzard conditions but rather a caramel glare of sunshine.