Authors: Mercedes Lackey
“If you don’t mind, sir, I think it is long since you had a brushing,” he said diffidently.
The Wolf looked at him down its long nose. “I think that you are right,” it replied, “and I would not say you nay.”
So before he returned the Wolf to its stall and chained it up again, he worked hard with brush and comb until the Wolf’s pelt was as soft and shining as a lady’s lapdog, and free of clumps of winter’s underfur. He then took a broom and swept all the fur out the door for the birds to take to line their nests.
That was all that there was on the right-hand side of the stables, but Sasha cleaned up the stalls anyway, and moved in fresh bedding. Then he went to the left-hand side.
Once again, the first stall was empty, but the second contained the biggest black he-goat that Sasha had ever seen in his life; it was easily the size of a warhorse. Sasha bowed to it, as to a boyar, while it looked at him down its long nose.
“If you don’t mind, sir, I would like to move you while I clean your home,” Sasha said to it. The he-goat shook his massive head till his ears rattled against his huge, curved, and cruelly pointed horns, and looked at Sasha sideways out of his big golden eyes with their bean-shaped pupils.
“Well, it’s all one to me,” the wise Goat said. “I’m doing nothing here until the witch decides to hunt something and saddles me for riding.” And Sasha looked at the side of the stall and saw a proper-sized saddle of bronze and a bridle of gold.
He untied the Goat and led him to the next stall, then asked, “Would you like some bread to eat while I clean your home?”
“Bread!” the Goat exclaimed, and his eyes grew greedy. “It is a long time since I had any bread!”
“Then I am happy to share mine,” said Sasha, who got another loaf from his belongings. He brought it and a bucket of cold, sweet water for the Goat, then set about cleaning the stall thoroughly. As with the Wolf, he then brushed and combed the Goat until the beast’s long hair was soft and silky again, as lovely as a maiden’s hair, and free of all the knots that had been in it.
“You’ve done me good turns, young man,” the Goat said as Sasha returned him to his stall, now deep with clean straw and rushes, the manger full of hay, the bucket full of grain, the trough full of pure water. “I won’t forget them.”
Sasha moved on to the final stall, at the end of the stable, in a melancholy corner where very little light penetrated. He could see something small moving about in the darkest part of the stall, but couldn’t make out what it was.
“Hello?” he said, tentatively. “I’m here to clean your home.”
There was a huge sigh from the darkness, the same one he had heard when he’d come in through the door. “It’s not my home,” said a sad voice. “And I don’t know that it makes any difference. When you’re done here, she’ll eat you and add your bones to the fence and my stall will just get dirty all over again.”
“That’s no way to think!” Sasha said sharply, and came into the stall. And to his amazement, as his eyes got used to the deeper shadow, he
knew
the creature that was in there. It was as small as a child’s pony, as small as a donkey, with ears a yard long and two humps on its back. Its coal-black eyes were dull with depression, its coat unkempt and dusty, so that nothing of the original color could be seen.
“Sergei!” he exclaimed, gazing with astonishment at the Little Humpback Horse. “But—how did
you
end up here?”
He had never seen the Horse himself, but he had heard the tale often enough of how his grandfather jad won Sergei and his two handsome brothers from their mother, the Mare of the North Wind. The Horse raised his head sorrowfully and looked at him. “Do I know you?” it said wearily.
“My grandfather made a bargain with the Mare of the North Wind for your services,” said Sasha. “But I thought that a Godmother—”
“Oh it is my own stupid fault,” Sergei replied, dropping his head down to his knees again. “That wretched witch lured me with apples from the Garden of Solomon and acorns from the oak where the Katschei used to keep his heart. If I hadn’t been so greedy, I wouldn’t be here now. She has me well and truly trapped and even Godmother Elena couldn’t find me and free me.”
Sasha bent down and lifted up one of Sergei’s long ears to whisper into it. “I am the Seventh Son, a Songweaver, and a Fortunate Fool, and I will get you out of here. As my grandfather took your service, I will release you from your bondage.”
Slowly Sergei’s head came up. Light came back into his eyes, and he gazed at Sasha with renewed hope. “You would do this for me?” he asked.
“As ever I can,” Sasha replied. “For now, let us get your stall clean and made fit for you, and I will give you bread to eat while you wait.”
Sasha went and fetched the last loaf of bread. He redoubled his efforts on Sergei’s filthy stall, cleaning until it sparkled, then returned Sergei to a much more comfortable place. Sergei looked at the now clean stall, the thick bed of straw, the filled manger and bucket and water trough, and two tears rolled out of his eyes and down his cheeks. “It has been so long since anyone cared for me,” he said softly.
“Well now someone does,” Sasha replied, and proceeded to brush and comb the Little Humpback Horse until the dark grey coat shone like the tsar’s favorite steed on parade.
“She has me bound with a spell,” said Sergei. “She plays it on that flute thing.” And he nodded at a peculiar instrument hanging on the wall beside the stall.
And at that, Sasha smiled.
A musical spell, hmm?
Fortune was favoring her Fool.
If this goes wrong, Sasha is going to kill me,
Katya thought, as she lurked in a still-overgrown corner of the garden, just out of sight of the fountain where the Rusalka was sulking. Then again, if this went wrong, Sasha wouldn’t have to kill her….
She was waiting for the moment when she felt the Jinn appear, and hopefully she would even see him when he did. Then she would go down to the fountain and let the Rusalka attack her. Even if the Jinn didn’t see the attack, he should sense the small magic she would use to help to cover her ability to breathe water. Since he had already reacted poorly to her use of magic once, that should bring him, and then he
would
see the attack.
She fingered the high, uncomfortable gold collar she was wearing. She and the others had found it rummaging through the jewelry the Katschei had accumulated. Hopefully it would be enough to protect her neck and make the Rusalka switch from trying to choke her to trying to drown her.
There were a lot of things depending on hope, here. But then again, this Jinn was like a grain of sand in an oyster shell. The Tradition didn’t want him there, and was secreting layer after layer of magic to try to be rid of him. If she could only tap into that, her schemes would go much smoother.
Her head went up as she sensed the Jinn.
The hum was faint and far off, but growing nearer. She only wished she could tell what direction he was coming from.
The hum grew louder. Nearer now…
She looked about from under cover of the trees she was hiding among. No sight of him on the battlements. He might be somewhere inside the building.
Or not. The hum was still approaching.
Then it stopped moving. She looked around again, but still couldn’t see him. She was just going to have to take her chances.
Taking a deep breath, she walked out into the garden, the sun hitting her like a hammer, taking the path that was going to put her walking right past the fountain, as if she had forgotten that the Rusalka was there. And it took everything she had to pretend that she was focusing on something else, something off to the other side of the garden and not on the fountain.
There was no sign of the Rusalka, but then, there wouldn’t be. The evil bitch was hiding under the water, waiting. She’d spring out at the last moment….
Katya drew even with the raised basin of the fountain. Went a little past—reached about the middle.
With a shriek of pure rage, the Rusalka erupted from the fountain and seized her neck.
Katya didn’t have to feign a scream; even though she was expecting the attack, the Rusalka surprised her. She felt the strong hands closing around her neck, heard the Rusalka’s grunt of surprise as her hands encountered the collar. Meanwhile Katya was fighting back, kicking and scratching, pulling hair. The goal, after all, was certainly not to appear passive! As she scored the Rusalka’s face with her nails, the creature shrieked again, and with a sideways twist of her body, flung them both into the fountain with a tremendous splash. The water cushioned their fall, but the stone coping around the basin hit Katya in the leg so hard she knew it was going to leave a black-and-blue mark the size of her own head, and her head bounced off the bottom of the fountain hard enough to leave a lump. For a moment, they floated together in the water; it was a very deep fountain, quite deep enough even for a water creature like the Rusalka to swim in comfortably. Katya had both hands full of hair now and was pulling as hard as she could, all the while kicking viciously at the Rusalka’s legs. But the Rusalka was in her element now, and got her flipped over, and the next thing she knew, Katya was face down in the fountain with the Rusalka kneeling on her back, and the Rusalka’s hands pushing her head down.
Now, of course, her native ability to breathe water came into play. But now was the time when she worked that little bit of magic….
She went limp. And though she was breathing just fine, it would appear to anyone else that she had lost consciousness at best, and had drowned at worst.
Now as long as the Rusalka didn’t think to unlock that collar and start choking her just to make sure—
The weight was suddenly taken from her back, and she floated to the surface.
There were hands all over her, and as her head broke water, she heard her fellow captives shrieking in a quite convincing manner as they pulled her from the fountain and down onto the gravel path. While the others interposed themselves to keep the Jinn from seeing exactly what was happening, practical Marina turned her over and began pounding her back.
That was her signal to cough, wheeze, and gag, as if she were expelling water from her lungs.
“Katya!” Marina cried, “you’re alive!”
The others kept screaming, though—which was not what she had told them to do. And there was a roaring sound, and more heat than was coming from the sun. And a very odd, burning smell.
She rolled over onto her side, wanting to see what the Jinn was doing.
He was incoherent with rage. A circle of fire flared around him, and at least one set of shrieks was screams of pain, because they belonged to the Rusalka. The Jinn’s hands were burning her arms where he held her, feet dangling, well off the ground.
Not a word did he speak. He only held her, looked into her eyes, and laughed cruelly.
“I told you there would be peace!”
the brazen voice boomed.
“I told you that you would not touch the other captives! Now you pay the price of disobedience!”
Then he burst into flame, exactly as if someone had soaked him in oil and lit him.
She hung in his hands, on fire as he was, but alas for the Rusalka, she was not immune to his flames. Katya and the others watched in horror as she screamed and screamed, as the scent—not of burning flesh, but of burning water weed—filled the air. They watched as she stopped screaming, but still writhed in his hands, watched as she finally stopped moving, and then watched as, with a burst of white-hot fire, the last of her corpse was consumed and the pitiful caricature of a husk crumbled into ash in the Jinn’s hands, and the ashes rained down as a pile at his feet.
The fires abruptly vanished, as if they had been sucked into him.
He turned, slowly, and stared at them all, as they sat there, struck dumb. His eyes blazed still, burning like twin suns in his head.
“You will obey me when I give an order,”
he said.
They all nodded, numbly.
“Go to your room.”
They fled, Katya being half carried between Marina and Lyuba, her legs rubbery with a weakness she did not have to feign.
The little paper crane had found what it had been sent to find. There was only one small problem. How to get the two Champions’ attention? They were very large….
Sasha waited patiently beside the door to the stable, arms crossed, leaning his back against the wall. The newly cleaned shovel, fork, and barrow stood beside him. The stable was now lit by two cleaned and filled oil lamps. There was not the slightest trace of stink about the place. The only aromas in the air were the smell of fresh straw, the scent of fresh-cut rushes, and the sharpness of the bunches of fleabane he had hung in each stall.
Wonderful smells were coming from the witch’s hut; baking bread, roasting meat, the sweet smell of little tea cakes, all wafted from the chimney. Sasha reminded himself over and over, even as his stomach growled, that he should not get his hopes up, however good the food smelled. Now, it was possible that Baba Yaga might feed him well, give him the hospitality her bargain entitled him to….
Or she might treat him as she had treated the creatures in the stable. And truth be told, if she did the latter, it would be better for him. The Tradition would treat that as her breaking her bargain with him, which would leave him free to do what he was going to do anyway. There would be no repercussions if she was the first to be the one to break the deal. And that would be good.
Because he was going to free Sergei, and he would need every bit of his Luck and The Tradition on his side to do that.
And maybe, just maybe, the bread he had given the Goat and the Wolf would free them as well. By accepting his bread and the tiny bit of salt he had sprinkled on it, Traditionally speaking, they had accepted him as, not master, but liege. If they chose to. That was the key. If they had accepted him in their own minds, deliberately, then once the witch released them from their physical bonds…
But that was something he would not know, and could not know, until the moment they chose to act. If, in fact, they would.
The Goat, at least, had implied as much. But the Wolf?
The Wolf was the unknown.
And the Wolf was the most dangerous to his plans.
For the first time since he had started this quest, he had leisure and was able to think about the reason for his search. His heart filled with longing and just a touch of fear. Katya…Where was she? Was she safe? Or if not safe, at least in no immediate danger?
Or if not that…
She is brave, competent, clever. She will likely only need a little help from me, or none at all. I only hope when we finally meet, she isn’t angry at me for coming after her.
He tried very hard to convince himself of that. Tried to believe that the reason she had not returned, had not sent word, was that she was safe and secure, but in hiding and dared not break her secret cover. He tried to think about her as he had last seen her, plunging into the sea, ready to race to discover what it was her father needed her to do, full of high courage, and wit, and intelligence. But all he could really think about was Katya in his bed, sweet and fierce and…
And he needed to stop thinking about that right now. Because the rising in his groin was not going to be easily explained if the witch came out right now….
Suddenly the hut spun around to face him, and all amorous thoughts vanished in the baleful glare of those windows.
The hut squatted down, and Baba Yaga emerged, this time from the front door. If anything, she was even stranger to look at than he had thought. He hadn’t noticed her hunched back in the mortar. And somehow, the fact that her nose was so long it almost touched her chin hadn’t made much of an impression on him, either.
Or maybe it was possible she could change how she looked, and this even more grotesque face was her true one.
She scuttled up to him, and looked him up and down. He’d cleaned himself up, so he was fairly presentable. He gave the old witch a respectful bow, and she replied with a sneer, and stalked into the stable.
She emerged only a few moments later, with an interesting look on her face. Surprise, mingled with smugness and self-congratulation.
Oh ho. She thinks she has gotten herself a bargain. Which means, I think, that she is about to cheat me.
He presented her with a look of pure grinning idiocy. She mimed him following her to the hut.
He lost the grin. He shook his head vigorously, and looked at the door of the hut with exaggerated fear.
Or maybe not so exaggerated. He really did not want to go in that hut. Once he was in there, he was truly in the lion’s den.
She looked at him with impatience.
Then, unexpectedly, her hand shot out as fast as thought, and she seized him by the ear like any babushka with a naughty grandchild!
It was all he could do to avoid yelling something coherent. Her grip on his ear was as tight as a vise and painful. As she hauled him, stumbling, towards the hut, he gave voice to his feelings in a series of animal moans. Deaf-mutes could do that, he’d heard them. And he didn’t strike at her, much though he wanted to. But he did flail his arms wildly for balance, something that the old hag seemed to find very amusing, for she began chuckling.
She pulled him in through the front door—which, recognizing its mistress, did not devour them.
Once through, she let loose of his ear. Jumping away from her, he stood just out of reach, rubbing his sore ear and looking around with unfeigned wonder and no small amount of apprehension.
Outside, it was a tiny peasant hut. Inside, it was the biggest room he had ever seen in his life.
It seemed to stretch on in every direction forever. The ceiling was certainly a good five stories above them. But it was hard to tell where the walls were, because there were trees growing up through the floor, making this a forested room, if there was such a thing.
It was very brightly lit, with what must have been hundreds of lanterns hanging from the tree branches. And beneath those lanterns were enormous piles of…well…everything.
Within arm’s reach of where he stood, he could have picked up a chunk of raw amber from a pile of the same about as high as his shoulders, a sable skin from a huge pile of furs the size of the bed he and Katya had shared, an iron cooking pot of virtually any size from stacks of pots, or a ball of yarn of just about any color out of one of a pyramid of baskets brimming with yarn. There were similar stacks and piles and heaps of anything he could think of in every direction, with little paths between them. There had once been a crazy old noblewoman living in the palace who had never, ever, in all her life, thrown anything out. When she’d died and the servants had gone into her room, this was what it looked like. Or rather, this is what it would have looked like if she had been able to magpie everything she wanted for a thousand years.
And he didn’t touch
any
of it. In fact, he tucked both his hands behind him like a little boy who had been instructed
not
to touch.
He looked at her, anxiously. She chuckled, and crooked a finger at him.
He followed her as she scuttled down one of the paths beneath the trees, weaving in and out through piles of things that were, some of them, taller than his head. There were unset gems next to piles of wheat, barley, or rye. There were sacks of flour next to bars of silver. There were gold coins beside piles of turnips. She led him to a spot where there was a little wooden table, exactly the sort of thing you would expect in a peasant hut, with a stool beside it, and a wooden bowl, cup, and spoon on top of it. In the bowl, despite all of the appetizing aromas that had come from the kitchen, was borscht. He sat down at the table at her direction, looked up at her and at her nod, picked up his spoon and dipped into it.
Borscht indeed. And not even very good borscht, either. If this soup had more than a nodding acquaintance from all the way across the kitchen with any sort of meat, he would be very surprised. It was mostly beets and cabbage, the cabbage cooked until it was transparent, with a few lonely bits of carrot and turnip floating like sad little trading ships caught forever in the ominous red of the Cabbage Sargasso Sea.
In the cup, thin, sour kvass, poorly made, poorly brewed, the drink of choice when your only other choice was swamp water.
There was not even any bread, that staple of diet, the very essence of hospitality and goodwill, that thing that no meal was complete without, from the tables of the kings to the hovels of the peasants. There was always bread; when there was nothing else, there was bread. It was the wealth of the land, the life of the people.
She had given him no bread. And there was no salt in the borscht. She had accepted his bargain and withheld her hospitality and her protection.
He had worked honestly and hard for her. He had done more, far more, than she’d asked. The stable was clean enough that a tsar would approve. Entire families would have been willing to move in there. And she had seen how hard he had worked—and this was how she had repaid him.
He felt the pressure of The Tradition looming over him. And he did something he had never, ever done in all of his life.
Wordlessly, as he spooned up the tasteless soup, he asked it,
Is my bargain broken? Can I free her beasts? Can I rescue Sergei?
He did not get an answer in words, but the pressure lifted off, and he sensed currents moving and a kind of vague
yesness
settle over him.
She waited impatiently for him to finish. He looked up at her face, just beginning to scowl, and quickly drank up the last of the soup, using it to wash down the bitter kvass. She crooked a finger at him, and he jumped up and obediently followed her out through the piles to the door, then out into the open yard.
It was very late evening; already the stars were out, and the moon was just rising. She pointed at the stable and mimed sleeping. Well that was pretty much as he had expected. And really, the last thing he wanted was to be sleeping under the same roof as that hag. The saints only knew what she would do to him in the night.
Obediently he trotted out to the stable and bedded down in the stall next to Sergei’s, using a pile of hay for a pillow and an old horse blanket for a coverlet.
But then—he heard her shuffling footsteps as she entered the stable herself.
He curled up in a tight ball like a hedgehog, and feigned sleep. He heard her go off to the right first.
“Wolf, Wolf,” he heard her say, “am I your master?”
He heard the Wolf growl then, and reply, “As long as I only eat flesh slain in anger, you are my master.”
She gave a grunt of satisfaction, and this seemed to be the answer she was looking for, but his heart leaped, because the Wolf himself had told him earlier that he had, inadvertently, freed it! It had eaten bread, his bread, the bread baked in kindness by a woman who thought well of him—
He heard her shuffling over to the left, and heard her pause at the stall of the Goat. “Goat, Goat,” she grated, “am I your master?”
The Goat gave a derisive baa. “As long as I only eat that which was harvested in despair, you are my master,” the He-Goat replied sarcastically. And Sasha had to wince at that, because of what that implied about the grain, the hay, and the straw that Baba Yaga had provided for her slaves. The saints knew that the life of a peasant farmer was hard…but there were lords who made those lives harder still. When a peasant was not merely a peasant, but a serf or a slave…every grain, every blade of grass, every stalk was grown in despair…it would be easy enough for the witch to supply a hundred stables with such provender.
But Led Belarus was not such a kingdom…and the bread had been made with hope and happiness, not despair.
She shuffled over another few feet. He not only heard her stop at the door of the stall he was “sleeping” in, he practically felt her eyes boring into him.
He wriggled a little and tucked his head down farther, putting his arm over the top of it.
Satisfied, she moved on.
“No bargain would hold you, now, would it, my slippery little devil?” she chuckled. “And few spells. A pity I am the master of most spells, eh?”
He heard her take the odd flute down from the wall, and then she started to play.
He concentrated as hard as he could. It was a strange little tune, no more than five notes, and oddly minor. It had, he guessed, nine bars to it, and she repeated it nine times. By the third time he knew he had it memorized, but he still concentrated on it as hard as he could. He wanted, he
needed
to have every note exactly right.
The witch shuffled out again, pausing to hang the flute back up on the wall.
Sasha waited a long time, waited for the sounds outside to settle, waited to make sure the witch wasn’t coming back out.
Only then did he whisper to Sergei, “Has she gone to bed?”
“Oh yes,” the Little Humpback Horse said. “She won’t awaken until dawn. And since she has you to do the work of tending us, not then. What did she feed you?”
“Sour kvass, and a bowl of bad borscht with no salt. No bread.”
Sergei sighed. “That’s good on two counts. She’s not fattening you up to eat yet, and she hasn’t bound you to her will.”
“Three counts. She broke our bargain. She may have hired me, but she’s gone back on it by not giving me bread and salt and not feeding me properly.” He chuckled. “Now I can do what I want because she’s the one who broke the bargain.”