29

YOTUNKHEYM, THE IMPERIYA YOTNE: STUPKA-ZAMOK

The sight of the skulls brought a scream to my lips, but I didn’t let it break loose from my mouth and into the air.

I gripped Cobie’s hand as we walked closer, Anya ahead of us.

I’d heard the word bone used as a color before. Hannelore had argued one night with Ingrid over whether a gown was cream or eggshell or ecru or bone. I hadn’t realized there was any difference between the shades.

The skulls mounted atop the spears varied from sun-bleached white to faded gray to charred black.

Bone was, in fact, many shades. But every skull of every shade watched me with the same hollow eyes.

Cobie made a sound—a vague catching in her throat—and I squeezed her hand. Anya drew inexorably toward the gruesome fence as if drifting on a nightmare, unable to look away from the bones lifted high before us.

One of the guards shoved Anya, barking something I didn’t understand. And the gates opened.

The homes we’d passed on our journey were different, place to place. Some had been little white plaster things, red-tile roofs draped atop them like blankets. Some had been brown wood cabins; others had been cozy lodges of red brick, or of drystone, with little green lichens sprouting along the seams between the rocks.

I’d expected ruins here. I’d expected age, decay, water stains. All the Gothic mystery tied to childhood dreams of witches and dark queens, of the hungry headswoman who became the tsarytsya.

My childhood imagination was not disappointed.

We entered a city of a thousand little fortresses, each of gray and black stone, each of them armed to the teeth. A hedge of wooden and iron spikes surrounded the nearest house; algae grew over a miniature moat surrounding another. An underfed dog with a mud-caked coat barked and snapped at us from behind the fence of a third. The houses grew larger, taller, and sharper as we walked on, many surrounded by uniformed guards.

Every last one was dressed in gray. Leaning against walls and crouched behind fences and jeering at us as we walked past in chains.

There had been little gray anywhere in Norge. It had been a world of blue—blue-eyed boys, blue skies, blue Bilröst—banked in fields of gold.

England had been gray. But England had also been green—its sky full of mist and its earth the color of an emerald, scattered with copses of trees and rose gardens and patches of lavender. England’s gray had been the gray of a sky just before a gentle rain, the gray of a pearl or the wing of a dove.

This city was the gray of smoke and ash belching from teetering chimneys. The gray of a wolf’s pelt. The gray of unrelenting stone. And there was no green to be found inside its skull-topped gates.

More uniforms pushed past us as we were hauled through Stupka-Zamok’s streets, narrow and twisting between the houses that towered overhead like broken teeth. Soldiers in clusters strode around us, calling out to one another in sharp, clear voices; soldiers in formation marched past. Each time, we and the crowds of shouting and shoving commoners had to wait for their ranks to pass so we could carry on.

Once, we paused before a dozen soldiers being dragged on leads through town by a pack of their gray-uniformed fellows. Anya shut her eyes, listening hard as the bound men cried out, as their captors scoffed and insulted them.

“Deserters,” she finally whispered. “Baba Yaga does not look kindly on those who forsake her service.”

In the villages we had passed, we had met gauntness, hollow eyes, starving ribs. I had anticipated more of the same here. But if the gazes of the people of Stupka-Zamok were a little strained as they whispered and looked away, pressing close together to avoid us in the cramped, winding streets, they looked well-fed inside their gray clothes.

I saw no children anywhere.

And above the soldiers and the streets and the roofs of the hundred private fortresses, a great house rose stories high. Clouds hung heavy and gray overhead, and large birds of prey circled low.

I thought of every fairy tale I’d ever read, and I knew. A witch lived in that house.

It was a high tower of merciless gray at the choked, spiky heart of her world, skinny as a pike but for the top two floors, which bulged out into a wide, flat-topped disc. Windows dotted each floor, enough to see everything happening in the city below. Discordant statuary and fountains were scattered around the tower’s base, as if plunked there as an afterthought.

Remembering the tale I’d found in the Roots as a child, the whispered warning circulated by the tsarytsya’s opponents, I called up the picture of her storied hut: a cottage on chicken legs, groaning and shrieking high above the ground. That much was true; the disc at the top did almost seem to stand on a long, skinny leg over the city. And though the tower did not move as Baba Yaga’s hut did, the city around us grated and screeched with harsh sounds, with the whine of rusty metal on hard stone.

But the little whelps in the story had had to ask Baba Yaga’s yzbushka to turn away from the forest and to look upon them, and in this, reality differed from the fairy tale.

Baba Yaga’s tower had eyes in every direction. And unlike the children in the tale, I had no hope we’d find the comforts of hearth and home inside.

We stood before great iron doors carved top and bottom. One of our guards stamped twice on the stone porch, and the doors swung, creaking, to admit us. I bit back a gasp of relief as my feet met the cold slate floor of the foyer, clear of shattered glass and debris. My shoes had broken beyond repair that afternoon, and I’d walked the last few miles barefoot.

I held Anya’s and Cobie’s hands, as if we were little girls playing a game, and stared upward. Fourteen stone floors were stacked like iron rings above us, bridged by a delicate-looking iron staircase and echoing with harsh Yotne words. Dozens of windows admitted a dull, smoky gray light.

And everywhere, everywhere, moving around and around, the gray uniforms of Imperiya servants and soldiers. The effect was dizzying; I swayed.

Cobie wrapped an arm around my waist, her strength barely enough to hold me upright. I could feel the places where, in four weeks’ time, my gown had loosened and my frame grown thinner. Looking at my friends—my beautiful friends, with their dirty fingernails and greasy hair and their bodies grown gaunt—I couldn’t believe I had ever envied their slimness. Hunger had made me wiser.

The door slammed shut behind us, and a bar swung down into place against it with a heavy clang.

I jumped and glanced back at the doors and realized only then that the carvings at their top and bottom were teeth.

Gripping Anya’s hand, I turned back around. Her face was pale and somber, her blue eyes too big. I knew we were thinking the same thing.

When Baba Yaga locks the door,

Children pass thereby no more.

My fingers dragged my empty pockets, scrabbling for a rosary that wasn’t there as we crossed the wide atrium of Baba Yaga’s house to the narrow iron stairway, just wide enough for two to pass, at the center of the tower. Shafts of light cut through the windows as the guards forced us up the steps. Their glass was stained, like the windows in a church, but where the windows in Saint Christopher’s in Potomac and the cathedral in Winchester had shimmered with color, the ones in Baba Yaga’s house were gray like quartz. Artfully leaded wolves and teeth and towering plumes of smoke lurked at their edges.

Through the windows, I saw the citizens of Stupka-Zamok going about their lives and business. I wondered if they knew what happened outside the walls of their city or inside their tsarytsya’s house. I wondered if they cared.

My shackles clinked on my wrists as we climbed, long cold chains clattering against the bannister and dragging between my legs. Hunger gnawed at my belly and bones.

I quit counting the steps after a hundred and fourteen, because that was when my feet began to leave bloody prints on the iron latticework. I stopped, dragging my soles over my shins, trying not to whimper, trying to wipe up the blood.

One of the guards cursed and butted me with his gun, and I couldn’t stifle my cry.

My nose was running when we reached the second story from the top of the tower. Most of the floors we had passed were ringed with doors, but this one had just two, each a high thing made of smooth wood the color of a shadow. Like her front door, this one was carved top and bottom with long, sharp teeth.

A sentry opened the door, and we found Baba Yaga holding court inside.

The walls of the tsarytsya’s throne room were gray stone, punctuated with windows of the same smoky leaded glass. Mismatched oil paintings and marble busts and terra-cotta vases and ragged tapestries dotted the walls and filled pedestals across the room. Men and women in gray garments, their elegance betraying their rank above the citizens outside the tower, filled the spaces between the miscellaneous artwork.

I wanted to grip the doorframe and force our guards to pry me loose. But Anya slipped her hand into mine, and I put my hand on Cobie’s shoulder, and we walked forward. The room went quiet.

“Ah,” said Baba Yaga, surveying us. I kept very, very still.

The tsarytsya of the Imperiya Yotne was tall and thin, with pale, papery skin and long gray hair that hung loose down her back. She had a stately, high-bridged nose and remarkable eyes—not for their color, which I’d wondered about so many weeks before; they were an ordinary-enough shade of brown.

Grandmother Wolf’s eyes were hungry.

The tsarytsya’s throne was not built of finger bones, as the chair in the Baba Yaga story was; it was a high-backed chair of iron wrought into twisting patterns like smoke. She sat tall in its rigid seat, and a brilliant silver crown studded with emeralds and sapphires rested on her brow. She took in each of us in turn as a guard said something quietly in her ear.

“Your names,” she called. Her voice was low, for a woman’s; it bubbled and popped unexpectedly, like brew in a cauldron.

I stepped forward, chains rattling against my legs. “Selah—”

But Anya lifted her chin and followed me, before I could say any more. “Anya, Prinsessa of Varsinais-Suomi, lately of the house of Asgard.” The crowd lining the room began to murmur, their eyes darting back and forth.

Anya pretended not to notice, but I saw the deep breath she drew in through her nose, the hard swallow at her throat as she kept her gaze on the woman on the throne.

“I’m Cobie Grimm.” Cobie tossed the words out.

Anya was still holding my hand. She gave my fingers a squeeze, and our shackles clanked together. My free hand reached for Torden’s ring in the matted hair at my nape, searching for comfort.

“Hmm. English. You are all a long way from home,” said the tsarytsya. “You, less so, Prinsessa Anya, but what a surprise to see you, nonetheless.” She emphasized Anya’s title, but her gaze wandered to me, as if she couldn’t quite place me.

Anya had interrupted me on purpose. She was protecting me again, distracting the tsarytsya and the court with her name and title.

When none of us said anything more, the tsarytsya shifted in her seat, tone growing businesslike. “Come you here of your own accord, or are you compelled?”

I stiffened. This, at least, was exactly what the Baba Yaga of the story had said.

I straightened my shoulders and told the tsarytsya what I had told myself again and again on the Gray Road to her house. “I chose this.”

She cocked her head amid the startled murmurs of the crowd, pointing a bony finger at Anya and then at Cobie. “And you?”

“Yes,” Cobie said, without a moment’s hesitation.

Anya nodded. “Yes.”

Baba Yaga took us all in a moment longer, the silver crown listing over her pale brow. Then she jerked her head at a guard. “Make them useful.”

“Tak tochno, moya tsarytsya.” He brought his heels together sharply and hustled us from the room.

I cast a glance over my shoulder as we passed from the throne room, back at the bloody footprints I’d left on the slate floor.

I determined then and there that it was the only blood I or my friends would shed in this house. We would survive and get back to the ones we loved.

My father was waiting for me. My new little sibling was waiting for me. Fritz had been right: I would have to be clever to live long enough to see them again.

If you’re one step ahead of them, Penelope had taught me, they still haven’t caught you.

The tsarytsya was still watching us as we left—still eyeing me, as if she were a haruspex and I her sacrifice, no more than organs and entrails laid out before her divining gaze.

And the look in her eyes chilled me to the bone.