A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

  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 e
yes 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.”

  “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that!” Sergei exclaimed. “But—”

  “You just let me take care of a little something. Tomorrow you and I and Wolf and Goat will be free.” He knew he wouldn’t need to raise his voice for the others to hear him, and he was right.

  “We’re still bound by the rope and chain,” the Wolf pointed out. “Those are still enchanted. We can’t leave the stable unless she takes them off with her own hands.”

  “Oh she will,” Sasha chuckled. “She will. Now, I’m going out into the woods to see what can be done about Sergei’s spell.”

  He had never seen a flute that looked like this one, and he had certainly never heard a flute that played the notes this one did. The scale sounded all wrong to his ears—a series of pensive, breathy notes in a minor key. He didn’t want to play it around the stable or around Sergei for a couple of very good reasons. He didn’t want to be so close to the hut that there might be a chance that the witch would hear him playing. And he didn’t want to be near Sergei on the chance that something he played might have bad consequences when crossed with the spell that was already on the Little Humpback Horse.

  That would be bad. Very bad.

  So he picked his way across the yard until he came to a path into the woods. He had the feeling that there would be at least one good path, if only to a pond or a stream, or a place where the witch could cut her firewood.

  And so it proved. There was indeed a pond, and from the looks of it, a good deep one. As he neared the verge, he heard ducks quacking quietly in their sleep, and smiled. Good. They would give him the alert if anything crept up on him.

  He sat down on a tree trunk, put the flute to his lips, and blew, very carefully. There were stories of instruments like this that screamed or shrieked if anyone but the owner tried to play them.

  But not this time.

  The first note sounded out, breathy, but true, low and tremulous.

  He ran the scales, slowly, getting used to the progression of notes, of where his fingers had to go for what. It was a deceptively simple instrument. He found he could get half and even quarter tones out of it if he was clever. But the witch had not been a musician, and she had stuck with the simple tune of the song.

  So now he practiced it, although he took care to break it before he got to the ninth repetition, inserting some other little ditty. And when he was certain he could play it in his sleep and backwards—

  Then that was what he did. He played it backwards.

  He had had an odd feeling about that music when he had heard it. It had seemed to him that this spell was powerful—but simple. Baba Yaga had never been known to be any kind of a musician. He suspected that any spell that she cast by means of music would have to be simple.

  So it followed—

  It followed that the power was in the magic that Baba Yaga controlled. But the spell itself should be easy to undo. She was familiar with the use of her own power. She was unfamiliar with music. If he played the same music backward…he should be able to unravel the spell.

  It was rather like knitting. It took a great deal of time and skill to knit up a garment. But it only took one snip of a scissors and it was easy to unravel, and took little time and effort at all.

  And certainly no skill.

  When he thought he was ready, it was very nearly dawn. The sky was beginning to go grey in the east, and he didn’t want to take the chance that the witch might decide to wake up early and kick the deaf-mute awake before going back to her bed.

  He returned to the stables.

  “Now this is what we are going to do,” he told them all. “I am going to try to break the spell on Sergei. If I succeed, he and I will escape—”

  “What about us?” the Goat asked suspiciously. But the Wolf was already laughing.

  “Brilliant!” the Wolf chuckled. “How long before I raise the alarm?”

  “As long as you think you can get away with and not be punished,” Sasha told him honestly. “At least give us as much of a head start as you can.”

  “Oho!” the Goat exclaimed, his ears coming up. “With us raising the alarm, she won’t suspect us! And the hunt will be on! She will loose the Wolf to track and loose me to ride!”

  “And you can be rid of her however you choose once you are set on the track.” Sasha nodded. “If I were you, Goat, I would wait until you were a good long distance from here. I don’t think she can summon that mortar to her, so the longer her walk, the more time you will have to make your own escapes.”

  The Goat nodded. “Best get on with it, Prince. Your luck may not hold forever.”

  That was very good advice indeed, and he set about implementing it. “If you know any ways of helping this work, I suggest you start doing them now,” he said, and began to play.

  He narrowed down his concentration to get each note exactly right, to keep track of exactly how many times he had played through the reverse tune. This had to be perfect. He might not get another chance.

  He finished the last note.

  And the flute shattered in his hands.

  There was a muffled sound. He looked up to see Sergei’s long ears clamped over his mouth to keep his laughter from escaping as he danced around for joy. The rope holding him had disintegrated into fibers and he was free.

  The Goat was dancing in place, too, and the Wolf was laughing silently, tongue lolling.

  “Go!” said the Goat, shaking his horns. “We’ll give you as much of a head start as we dare.”

  It might have seemed like a waste of time to gather up his belongings before he flung himself on Sergei’s bare back. But he didn’t dare leave anything for Baba Yaga to use to bring him back, or even worse, somehow get to Katya.

  But with his pack on his back, his legs tucked up, because otherwise they would drag on the ground, and bent over Sergei’s neck, they tiptoed past the hut. Despite that both of them were afire to flee, this of all times was the moment to take care.

  The hut did not appear to notice as they passed, and remained standing on one of its legs like a slumbering chicken. Then they were out of sight, and they ran like the wind itself, careening down forest paths only Sergei seemed able to see.

  “Can’t you fly?” Sasha shouted, for now that they were well away from the hut, Sergei was going for speed and his little hooves were hitting the ground so fast it sounded like continuous rolling thunder.
>
  “She has a host of spirits that serve her, and serve her well,” Sergei shouted back. “I dare not fly, they will be on us in an instant.”

  Well, then they would just have to run.

  The only trouble was…they suddenly ran out of forest.

  Sergei burst through the trees and skidded to a halt, as he realized that they were on the side of a mountain, and were now above the tree line. They had been running so fast, and so hard, that neither Sasha nor Sergei had realized they were gradually climbing the shallow slope of a very large mountain indeed. And before they could turn and run back under the cover of the trees—

  It was too late.

  The horde of spirits bound to Baba Yaga, who must have been following them above the trees, descended on them.

  Sergei gave a little buck and Sasha tumbled to the ground. “Go!” Sergei shouted. “Run! Hide! It’s me they’re after!”

  And before the spirits—the ugly tattered ghosts of the evil dead—actually reached them, Sergei shot off into the sky. “Try and catch me, boneless, bloodless rags! Servants of a feeble old witless hag! You couldn’t catch a sneeze, much less me!”

  The horde sped off into the sky after Sergei. Only a few hesitated. And while they were hesitating, Sasha bolted.

  He had no clear idea where to run to—and a moment later he tripped, fell over, and began a headlong tumble down the steep slope of a ravine he hadn’t even seen before he fell into it.

  All he could do was curl up as tight as he could get, and hope he didn’t hit anything lethal—

  At least the three tattered ghosts kept missing him as they darted at him, claw-like talons extended to shred him into rags.

  It was one bruising impact after another. He gritted his teeth and endured the punishment, trying to keep his head tucked in and out of danger. And it was nausea-inducing dizziness too; even if he did come to a stop rather than hurtling down a hole, would he be able to stand up and stagger off before the spirits got him?

  And then, with a bone-jarring thud, his back hit something solid enough to stop the tumble and knock the wind out of him for good measure. For several moments after he uncurled he was too busy thinking about trying to get a breath back into his lungs and to make the world stop spinning around him to worry about ghosts or much of anything else.