57

It took two days to clean the castle of Zatemnennya’s filth. I was removed to my new rooms the next morning. The day before my wedding.

She was waiting for me when I arrived, standing over a trunk full of gray garments. A bridal trousseau the color of ashes, of a life burned to the ground. The tsarytsya spread her arms wide, showing me all her teeth in a smile. “What do you think?”

“I’d never seen myself in gray,” I said as smoothly as I could. “Then again, I’d never seen my own claws for what they were.”

To marry Torden, I would’ve worn green, or gold. But that day would never come.

I felt toothless. Clawless. My chest ached from the knife I’d driven into his heart.

Baba Yaga’s smile only grew more ferocious. “Delightful.”

“Will Aleksei be admitted to my chambers tonight?” I cast my eyes down, clasped my hands.

She arched her brows. “Do you wish him to be?”

With Anya and Cobie in the basement, so many floors away, I’d be glad of the company. “It might ease tensions tomorrow.” I bit my lip, tried to look like a blushing bride.

The tsarytsya liked me blunt, forceful; I knew this girlish, timid version of me wouldn’t impress her. But I wouldn’t know how to feign confidence about a night alone with a boy—not even for Baba Yaga.

“As you will.” The tsarytsya waved a hand, disinterested. Then she looked at me sidelong. “I wish to speak to you of other things.”

The tsarytsya leaned near to me, whispering as though she had a secret. My stomach twisted. “I know that you despise my General Midnight, my Polunoshchna.”

I smoothed my face. “I serve Polunoshchna as I serve Vechirnya, as I serve Rankovyy, as I serve you, moya tsarytsya.”

She laughed wearily. “Oh, my little Zolushka. I may not be young anymore, but my eyes are still good. You are quite the pretender, but I see. I see.”

The Baba Yaga of whispers and wild rumors was famed not for her eyes but for her nose, keen enough to scent out Bears and Wolves and Lambs alike. Could she smell me for the liar I was?

“I will marry you to my General Bright Dawn,” she said softly. “And someday, after me, you will be tsarytsya.”

The room rang with my silence. “Surely, moya tsarytsya,” I finally said, “you jest.”

But her face did not collapse into amusement. Grandmother Wolf waited, expectant.

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because I see myself in you.” Baba Yaga bared her teeth in a smile. “I have not always felt like mistress of my own destiny. I took it, as you have taken yours.”

I moved away from her slowly, backing against the fireplace. The ashes on the hearth were soft beneath my bare feet. “What do you mean?”

“I was captured once, as well.” Baba Yaga’s voice was low and sweet. “Held hostage for a week. Scared for my life. And I did escape. But that was long ago, before I even became headwoman.” She paused. “Back when they called me Vasylysa.”

I froze, then shook myself. No. She—

“You?” I breathed. “Your—your name is Vasylysa, too?”

It was a common name, I knew. Common as Ivan.

“Too? That’s what they called me.” She fingered the silver-gray thread on my wedding gown, smiling absently. “Vasylysa the Beautiful. Before they called me Grandmother Wolf.”

“But you told me—that serving girl—” I broke off, unable to speak.

“The girl?” She frowned.

“The girl who was cleaning the fireplace.” My voice grew shrill. “The girl I spoke up for. The reason you acknowledged me in the first place. You called her Vasylysa.”

She waved a hand. “I don’t remember her. I remember you lifting your chin in Midnight’s face, speaking to her with no fear.”

My mind reeled. I tried to focus, to remember everything the tsarytsya had said about Vasylysa’s banishment, Vasylysa’s testing.

“Selah!” The tsarytsya snapped. She was close to my face, her expression annoyed. “Forget about serving girls and fireplaces. Forget about her. She is nobody. She is not like you and I.”

Nobody.

I had called myself nobody when I first met Polunoshchna. But Baba Yaga had searched me out. She had even broken her own rule to lure me into the open, had told her generals to speak English, had seated me at her table to see what I would do if she gave me teeth and claws.

My mouth was dry. “And we’re . . . ?” I asked.

“We are the stepdaughters. We are the girls who become wolves because no one will feed us like lambs. We are the girls in the stories, and the world is ours.” The tsarytsya’s papery-skinned hands clenched into fists. “We take what we will, and it belongs to us by right. We are wolves and queens and the moon, and our people love us. That is where the others belong in the stories: in the crowds, watching us from illuminated edges.”

Baba Yaga had been pacing the room, chin lifted, eyes bright. Now she stopped, her gaze earnest on me. “That is why most of them should not read the stories, little Selah. The songs and the paintings and the stories make them think they are heroines and heroes. They put false visions into their minds.”

It was brutal. Selfish. Hideous.

She had built herself a high, horrible tower, and she looked down on the world from above, and she believed herself greater than it all. “What happened to Vasylysa?” I asked, hardly able to breathe.

“I killed the captain who had captured me on the border in Medved,” the tsarytsya said. “I rode back to my father’s village and to my stepmother’s garden and salted every square inch of the earth she tended more carefully than she had ever tended to me. And then I turned her and my stepsisters out and took back my house.”

“And after that?” I choked out.

“I took my spoils to every impoverished home in our village. And then I took my revenge. On the Bear, and on everyone else who had been content to let us starve.” Baba Yaga’s brown eyes shone with terrible fire, lit aflame by the memory.

I pressed my lips together, terrified, desperate to stroke her ego and keep her calm. “And now you reign over all.”

“And you will, after me. I want Rankovyy managed, and I want Polunoshchna to doubt herself at every turn. It makes her work harder.” She winked at me.

Baba Yaga had escaped the monsters only to become a monster herself.

“I’m not like you,” I whispered hoarsely. “I don’t think I’m like you.”

I did not want her favor, or her throne. The tsarytsya was wholly repulsive.

And yet, some part of me wished to know whether she saw a wolf or a lamb before her.

“You are the stepdaughter who was turned out, as I was,” she said, fixing me with her gaze. “You are the prisoner who traveled barefoot across thrice-nine lands to come to the thrice-tenth kingdom, and arrived bleeding but upright on my doorstep. You are the girl who hung on by her fingernails, ash on her face as the world burned around her, and survived.”

“No.” I shook my head, ever so slightly. “I survived because I had friends to love and protect me.”

“You survived because you had the grit to do so.” Her tone was final. “And if you can survive, you can rule. If you will let me teach you, I will make you heir in the stead of the children I never wanted.”

My heart was a block of ice. I was cold with horror at the glimpse I’d gotten inside her brutal mind.

I should have shut my mouth. I should have let her leave when she turned to go.

“Moya tsarytsya,” I called. She looked back at me. “What makes the girl Vasylysa any different from the girls in your cellar? If you escaped, and fought back, what makes you think someone else won’t do the same?”

I posed the question as a rhetorical. As a fascinating thought game I wanted her to play with me. But I was telling her future. It was the same verdammt story, over and over again.

Alessandra. Vasylysa’s stepmother. Baba Yaga herself. They were sisters in arms, guilty of hurting the Vasylysas of the world. Culpable for all the girls they had wounded and embittered.

Those girls would get their revenge. And the architects of their suffering would have only themselves to blame.

“Because there are none like me, and few enough like you,” Baba Yaga said to me from the doorway. “We, little Zolushka, are the end of the story.”

Aleksei came to me in the dark.

“Selah?” he whispered though the just-open door.

I tugged him inside. “Come in.” Aleksei winked at the guard outside the door. I wrinkled my nose at him. “Oh, ew.”

“You’re right, I should’ve let him think we were plotting the demise of his empress and the end of the world as he knows it,” Aleksei countered.

“Shut up.” I pulled him toward the bed, sitting cross-legged on its edge. He bounced twice on the mattress before he settled, crossing his long, bony legs. Two candles flickered in sconces on the wall. “What happened today?”

Aleksei held up his index finger. “I found Torden, Fredrik, and the rest of the drengs.” His mouth was a tight line. “They’re alive.”

I exhaled. Alive would have to be enough for now.

“And the Beholder’s crew?” I asked.

“Nothing.” His voice was chagrined. My heart sank. “I searched high and low for them. Midnight’s keeping her cards close to her chest. But I won’t give up,” Aleksei added quickly.

I bit my lip and nodded. “What else?”

Aleksei held up a second finger. “I found the mothers,” he said. “The Rusalki.”

“You did? How?” I exclaimed.

“They couldn’t keep away,” Aleksei said, smiling grimly. “Actually, I wouldn’t have seen them at all, but a little girl started waving at nothing beyond the edge of the training ground, and my guards apprehended a few of them.”

I leaned forward. “And?”

“And I recognized some of them. So when we were alone, I used the call sign from Shvartsval’d you taught me. I tried to reason with them, explained what we wanted to do.” Aleksei paused. “And they spat in my face.”

“They what?”

“They called me a thief. They called me a monster. A barbarian.” Aleksei tried to smile. “It got very tiresome, mostly because they were entirely correct. But I tried, Selah. I tried to tell them.”

“I know you did.”

We are the girls in the stories, and the world is ours.

The tsarytsya was wrong.

This was not her world. Lands and worlds and stories belonged to everyone.

And Yotunkheym belonged to its mothers. Its children. Its cooks and its maids, its servants and its lambs, and the people who loved its wilds and its cities alike.

I hoped so badly not to leave it to the wolves.

“Can you remember anything about them?” I put a hand on his arm. “How many were they?”

He steepled his skinny fingers, thinking. “There were nine of them, not all Rusalki. Six women, three men, eight with Yotne accents. One with an English accent, actually.”

“English?” I blinked at him. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. I couldn’t forget a girl like that. Dark hair and pale skin.” Aleksei smiled. “And it was the strangest thing. She had fistfuls of yellow flowers stuck in her pockets.”