31

We woke to the clanging of pots and pans, ashes on our cheeks and arms and feet.

I was leaden with sleep. I’d been dreaming of the Beholder, of working in the galley with Will and of the candle I’d stolen that Lang had blown out.

“Zolushka,” muttered one of the maids. The head cook drew back at this, surprised, and dealt her a sharp answer.

I didn’t understand their Yotne words. But the maid’s was clearly an insult, and the cook’s was clearly a reproof.

“Spasibo,” I said to the cook quietly.

She gave me a bracing nod, then pointed at a pile of potatoes beside the sink. “Wash.”

It was her most frequent order, and the nickname I silently began calling her.

We scrubbed potatoes until Wash and the rest of the cooks looked like potatoes. As soon as we finished scrubbing one pile, another was placed before us. Potatoes were peeled, grated, boiled, mashed, fried into pancakes, stuffed into the dumplings they called pelmeni. When there were no more potatoes to wash, there were dishes.

I was used to the easy timbre of work in the galley. But there had been two of us in the Beholder’s kitchen, and a mere fifteen souls aboard; two dozen women worked in the tsarytsya’s kitchen and laundry, speaking as many languages, running a tower that housed hundreds—courtiers, soldiers, advisers, and Baba Yaga herself. There were no breaks in our labor; the work was constant. Wash cooked with all the ceaseless efficiency of an army general, with all the eye to taste of a parent feeding their family, clucking like a mother hen to move us from task to task.

I wondered if Wash liked kitchen work, and where she’d learned it. Had she grown up the daughter of a great house, and learned from her own cook? Had her father or mother taught her? Or had she learned as she worked, perhaps in this very cellar?

My mind turned the questions over like a spinning wheel as the three of us scrubbed dishes for hours. And then Wash issued a new order.

“You,” she said to Cobie, Anya, and me, then issued a long command in Yotne.

“Ya—idu?” Anya asked haltingly, pointing at herself. She spoke the Yotne words with the cadence of someone who’d learned a few bits of a language here and there—just enough to ask for something to drink or count to ten.

Wash nodded. “Tak. You three. Beds and towels—change them.”

I followed Anya out of the basement and up the stairs, oversize basket gripped tightly in my hands, dreading the inevitable sight of soldiers again. When we reached the first floor, Cobie glanced around the open foyer, then nodded at the house’s great front door.

Anya nodded. “Now. Let’s go.”

I felt like I’d been doused in cold water. “Now? We’re—just—now?” I’d told myself we would escape; but I’d banked on preparation, on allies. On a moment to get my feet beneath me.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Cobie said tightly. “The cook may never let us go again.”

“Okay,” I breathed. My heart was hammering in my chest, but she was right. We had to try.

I had seen the way Baba Yaga and her court had looked at Anya. And it was only a matter of time before she recognized me.

I had run out of time and tick marks long ago. There was no knowing how much longer Daddy had left.

The three of us walked toward the door, heads down, baskets bumping against our hips. I prayed for gaps to open up and hide us.

I didn’t know where we’d go, if we got out. But anywhere was safer than Baba Yaga’s Mortar.

One step at a time. One blistered foot forward, stone past stone.

“Aghov! Stop!”

I glanced up; a guard stood before the door, his hand outstretched, barking at us in rapid Yotne.

Of course. Of course the front door would be guarded. It had been when we arrived. My heart sank a little.

“Mitä?” Anya let her eyes go wide, her voice almost childishly high as she babbled a string of language that didn’t sound like Yotne.

The guard’s brow furrowed. “Fins’kyy?”

The Yotne called Anya’s childhood home Finlyandi; she must have addressed him in her mother tongue. She nodded, and his scowl softened a little bit.

He was young—just a boy our age, no older than Torden or Aleksei. His brown hair was shaved nearly to his skull so it looked soft as a peach. But when he put his hands on his hips, the wolf tattoo on his forearm flexed, and I remembered where we were.

Anya asked a few more halting questions, and the guard ushered us back toward the stairs. One more floor, he seemed to be saying with a smile.

Cobie and I made for the staircase, but Anya paused, blond lashes batting over blue eyes sweet as a baby’s. She asked him a question, and he grinned crookedly, crossing his arms around his rifle.

“Anya,” she said, curtsying.

“Ivan.” He pressed a hand to his chest and gave a little bow. The wolf on his forearm shifted with his muscles.

Anya nodded, seeming to blush before hauling us up the stairs, giggling.

“What was that all about?” Cobie glowered at her as we climbed the stairs.

We reached the landing of the first floor, and Anya went stone-faced.

“Reconnaissance.” Then she turned into the nearest bedroom and began to strip sheets off the mattress.

Ivan, Anya informed us quietly as we worked, was at his regular post this morning. We had caught him during the brief half hour he was alone, when his fellow soldiers took their noon meal. “He said he’s there from sunrise to three in the afternoon, and that he had to stay on duty during lunch, because he’s the freshest recruit. He thought I was flirting.”

“I did, too,” Cobie admitted.

Anya balled up a sheet and threw it at her, accusatory. “That boy is our enemy, Cobie Grimm.” She glided to the washbasin and gathered up the wet towels, piling them into her basket. “Besides, Skop’s waiting for me. Somewhere out there.”

She swallowed hard and stared out the window, at a river the color of pewter winding beyond the city wall. My gaze followed hers, and I knew I was searching for the Beholder, as I searched for her everywhere I went. But she had no way of finding me, so high in this tower, caught in Stupka-Zamok’s sharp teeth.

We pulled sheets from beds, cases from pillows, towels from washbasins, replaced them all. Room after room, floor after floor. Some belonged to courtiers, some to staff, others to soldiers.

I was grateful not to meet any of Ivan’s fellows in their quarters.

The stairs rattled beneath our weight as we hauled ourselves up and down their length. “Who built a staircase this narrow for a house so large? What a nuisance.” Anya clicked her tongue as we huddled against the railing yet again for half a dozen soldiers to troop past, whistling appreciatively at us; I had to pinch Cobie on the arm to stop her snarling at them.

“Be smart,” I whispered. “Save all that up for later.”

Cobie’s lip curled, but she nodded, and we carried on.

The second floor from the topmost, we knew from our first day, held the tsarytsya’s throne room and her grand dining room; we bypassed it and carried on to the top floor. But a uniformed guard at the door shook his head. “Ni. Nasha tsarytsya sleeps.”

But the door opened behind him. We met the eyes of the tsarytsya, their red rims the only color in her pale, bony face.

I expected her to turn us away. To order us downstairs, never to return to her chambers again. After all, she knew Anya’s name. She knew her allegiance. She knew how dangerous a shield-maiden could be.

But Baba Yaga only eyed us dismissively, as if she were staring down a huddle of sheep alone with no shepherd. “Come back tomorrow,” she said, and shut the door.

Back down in the kitchens, the cook eyed our piles of dirty linens with grim approval. Freckled arms elbow-deep in a batch of dough, she nodded to the laundry door.

“I know, I know,” I mumbled.

“Wash,” we said simultaneously.

The laundry was empty. Sheets and towels formed mountain ranges at one side of the room; the other was a forest of lines and clothespins. I took a cake of harsh soap and dunked a pillowcase in one of the great tubs.

The soap stung, humidity clung to the stone walls, and the room soon grew so hot from the fires under the tubs I wished I could work in my underwear. But here, at least, we were free to talk.

“So there are fourteen floors,” Cobie whispered. “Top floor is Baba Yaga’s room. Second from the top—the thirteenth—is her throne room and her dining room.”

“Two through twelve are the bedrooms and offices of personnel and guards,” I added, scrubbing the soap cake over a sheet. “We didn’t go into any of the offices—should we have?”

“Maybe,” Anya said. “We’ll have to wait and see if the cook sends us up to empty rubbish, to take up meals.”

My arms fell still, tangled beneath a heavy, wet sheet. “How are we going to get out?” I asked softly. “I wish the two of you hadn’t come. I wish you weren’t trapped here with me. I—” My words caught in my throat. “I think we might survive this. But escape? There’s only one exit, and it’s under guard. And besides, where would we go?”

Weeks of starving and the day’s hard work had left me weary, and weariness made me doubtful. Would I ever see my home again? My father, my godmother? Would I ever meet my little brother or sister?

“I’d want to follow the river north to the sea, but we’d be caught,” Anya said. “Rivers mean towns, and towns mean guards. If we can get our hands on a map and try to find neutral territory, we can attempt to contact the Beholder somehow.”

“We’d do best to stay in the woods and the wild and get back to Norge that way—I know, I know.” Cobie grimaced as Anya made a face. “But the Shield’s house is secure. From there we could hail the Beholder and wait.”

To hide in Asgard, huddled behind the Shield of the North with Torden at my side and Anya’s brothers around us? It sounded like a dream—a coward’s dream, but bliss nonetheless. I fought down my aching. “Perrault said he would contact Alfödr. They may already know where we are.”

“Here’s what I really want to know,” Cobie continued. “What’s the tsarytsya’s plan if someone attacks this place? That staircase is barely wide enough for two of us to walk up side by side. If there were an emergency, people would die.”

“Maybe she doesn’t care about the people who serve her,” I said quietly.

“Does she care about herself?” Anya muttered. “Because her room is on the top floor.”

“Maybe there’s an exit from the roof,” Cobie said.

I swallowed, feeling my shoulders sag. “Or perhaps she believes the tower is impregnable. Her city is well guarded, and her house is a pillar of stone.”

Cobie set her jaw and dropped her clothes in the tub. “Maybe she thinks it is,” she said, taking each of our hands, her own slick with soap and water. “Maybe she feels untouchable here, behind all her spears and skulls. But never forget that as secure as this place is, and as unafraid of us as she may feel, we are already inside. And now, we know where she sleeps.”