Unchosen

by Jeffrey Cook

  "And what about you?" Hobie said.

  "I think they'd get really bored waiting for me to limp that direction, or even just stand back up," Nils said.

  “What if we need firewood or something?”

  “We get it in groups, from fallen trees and branches only. We keep watch, and we stay in the camp. Leave the forest undisturbed.”

  "Should we be trying the roads again?" Celeste asked.

  Nils shook his head. "The vast majority of things out here are most likely curious. And some of them are tricksters, and some of them are just defenders of the forest. Hard to know exact demographics because again, the sample size in general has gone down in the past century, what with the genia loci presumed asleep.”

  “The what?” Hobie asked. “Definitely can't go running to the library,”

  “Place-spirit. I mean Baba Yaga, one of her aspects anyway. My point is, we don't know how much of these things are around and what strains. But almost none of them are likely to risk themselves against an armed group that includes wards, a priestess, and a spellcaster—”

  “Now hold on.” This time, it was Celeste's turn to object, and Noriko knew why, and Nils certainly had the interruption coming if he couldn't be more considerate of her religion. “What have I said about talking about us like we're playing Dungeons and Dragons?”

  Nils sighed. “A traiteuse and an occultist. They're not going to be busting into camp to start a fight. The daemons and cultists, on the other hand? I can pretty much guarantee 100% of them are hostile.”

  “But when Rhalissa's old coven-mate wakes up, won't they all coordinate?” Noriko asked.

  “Maybe. But if the daemons just do what comes naturally to them, they'll be picking a lot more fights with the forest than we are, and political alliances might not even come up. So let's just all stick to the rules and stick with the camp. Including and especially if you start hearing music."

  It was after they posted a watch and went to bed for the night that Noriko started hearing noises too. Startling awake, she sat up and looked around. For a few brief moments, she thought she saw lantern-like points of light in the woods, but they were gone within instants. Then she heard the noise that had woken her again, though she couldn't place where it was coming from. Much as she regretted it, she shook Nils awake. A quick check around the small camp confirmed that the other two were awake already and had heard it too.

  "What is that?" Noriko asked.

  While trying to place it, she kept being distracted by more hints of light and movement just out of the corners of her peripheral vision. Eventually, though, she definitely picked up on a voice on the wind.

  "What's it saying?" Celeste asked.

  Hobie was up, armed, and tense, but he'd followed his brother's request to stay in the campsite. "Effectively,” he said, “'Get off my lawn.' I think Baba Yaga might be awake."

  "Awake, yes. But I doubt she's noticed us, specifically," Nils said, trying to sound reassuring. "I think a lot of people in the region may be getting nightmares. If she's up, though, it would explain the uptick in forest spirits. This is going to get a lot trickier."

  "You think she's not able to notice us with your magics, when the forest... things, seem to have?" Noriko asked.

  "I think," Nils said, trying to settle back in, "that we're kind of beneath her notice right now. It's like... you can object to flies being in your house, but you don't notice every single fly. But if she really is up, aware, and moving, it's going to rile up a lot of the forest's supernatural residents. As if Xharomor wasn't bad enough."

  "So, what do we do?" Noriko asked, catching another flash of movement.

  “We sleep. They'll be able to mess with us more if we're not rested. And we stick with everything agreed on earlier.”

  She had some trouble getting to sleep, no longer just suspecting they were being watched and likely surrounded, but sure of it. Noriko believed Nils. She did. But it was as hard to shake the thoughts as it was to shake the impression of movement in the corner of her eye. Rhalissa worked for the Otherlord, absolutely. She would want them destroyed. So eventually, everyone she had any alliance with would want them destroyed. Xharomor’s vampiric lieutenant was bad enough. A Greek Titaness of sorcery was bad enough. Baba Yaga had so much home-turf advantage that she essentially was the home turf. Noriko, on the other hand, was all too aware of how barely she herself had helped to repel an invasion of her own home court. And at what cost.

  Nils closed his eyes and rolled, trying to find something remotely comfortable. Noriko shifted one of her blankets over onto her boyfriend, and did her best to help him settle.

  “Liked the whole 'we're just the buzzing of flies to her, so sleeping in a forest full of things-that-go-bump-in-the-night should be fine' thing,” she said. “You're hot when you're dismissive of ancient menace.”

  The chuckle always sounded a little odd under the mask. “Thanks. Wish it could generate literal heat.”

  “Yeah.” She also wished his own limbs wouldn't present more obstacles to his sleeping than normal human anxiety in the face of inhuman hostility.

  Eventually she managed to sleep, at least until Hobie woke her up for her turn at watch. When he did, she shuffled all of her remaining blankets onto Nils. "Get some sleep,” she told Hobie. “We have a long way to go tomorrow."

  "Believe me, I know. I'm doing most of the walking."

  "Would you prefer I—"

  He grinned and cut her off. "No, no. I'll tow the sled. You snuggle with my brother."

  She sighed, then smiled. "Okay, but if you need the occasional break, between Celeste's stuff and the blankets, he'd be okay if you need to rest."

  He shook his head. "Just keep helping break stuff up when the sled gets tangled. Hard to do with the harness. I'd rather wear myself down during the day. Helps with getting to sleep."

  "Not sleeping well either?"

  "Not at the best of times. In the middle of war-time, when I just want to go hit something, and I can't? Plus the frustration of having a pretty good idea how long it's going to take to walk across Russia."

  "And you're worried about your brother," Noriko said.

  "And I'm worried about my brother," Hobie said. "But if you say that to him, I'm just going to acknowledge that I want him in ideal daemon-slaying shape by the time we get there."

  "He knows."

  Hobie nodded. "Just... try to keep him warm and all, okay? The Gisting Tower is still a long ways off."

  "I know. And meanwhile, there's avoiding Baba Yaga. Maybe he's right, and she hasn't noticed us. But still."

  "I trust him to know what he's talking about. But that doesn't mean she won't ever start swatting at flies."

  “Think Rhalissa may have warned her coven-mates, asked them to look out for us?”

  "Maybe. But Rhalissa, show ‘weakness’ on the eve of their big triumph? Doesn't sound like her. I don't know what they were like when they were all sorority girls and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but she's gotten paranoid in her old age."

  Noriko nodded. “I bet she hates Dr. Nathaniel as much as we do, then, as an interloper and all.” It was almost hard to remember him, sometimes. The march of tragedy dulled itself.

  Hobie’s face shifted, and he managed to speak even more quietly than the night required. “Please don’t use ‘we’ there, Noriko.”

  ****

  Getting Nils back into the boat the next morning was almost painful just to help with.

  Celeste was having to devote more and more of her efforts just to keeping him warm through the day, and Noriko started regretting every time she had to get out of the sled to help Hobie.

  Nonetheless, although it was painful—and painfully slow—they made progress. The trees even eventually began to thin, and they needed fewer stops to untangle the runners on the sled. Noriko was just starting to feel somewhat hopeful about their progress when they came to an abrupt halt just before they emerged from tree-cover entirely.

  "Hobie, what's wrong?" she
said, on alert at once.

  Hobie pointed. In the distance, there was movement. A thatched roof rose and fell as it traveled along. A wood-and-straw hut was making its way across the frozen ground on a pair of giant chicken legs. “No cracks about my folklore this time, Nils,” Hobie said. “Even I know whose house walks.”

  Noriko knew, too. Why a witch who notoriously could fly and warp the ground would invest in a walking house was beyond her, but she supposed that stray children had to be cooked somewhere.

  “Hobie, get out of the harness,” Nils said.

  “What'll get us away faster?” Celeste asked. “Turning the sled around, or everyone trying to run?”

  “We're not running away,” Nils said. “We're going towards it.”

  14

  Audience

  Kirke Aeaea

  Kirke was far from her home sea, but sometimes one had to speak with one's peers. That and that alone was worth stepping from her seat, from the hearth where she brewed, still. They had seen Rhalissa, and they had heard her.

  And for now, Kirke stayed a little longer with her peer. Her ever-peer, not the novice who once bled enough druids to death to claw her way to junior partner. A coven was best as three, but something was changing, and neither Kirke nor Baba Yaga cared for change they did not control.

  “Good fire,” Kirke said calmly. It was, though it didn't get rid of the necessity of the golden blanket in her lap as one small additional guard against the Russian cold. The large stove dominated much of the small room. It had to be large, of course, to accommodate some of Baba Yaga's occasional culinary habits. Kirke had no particular care one way or another for the fate of dinner, but still preferred warming fires to cooking coals. A handful of her peer's other accouterments were scattered casually around it: a few bindings not currently occupied, tongs, a cooking board, and the ancient Russian's famed oversized pestle, which was propped up by the stove.

  An affirming, but distracted, sound came. The gnarly, nearly-clawed hands rose to fidget with the long knots of hair, to scratch at the scalp. Just as Kirke herself wore a perfectly coiled golden braid through the centuries, her colleague had always been covered in flowing tangles, like silvery-white snow over the hills.

  Through this, Baba Yaga's fingers raked and picked, and occasionally, her eyes darted. Kirke did not ask about her minor irritation. Such had been near constant since Baba Yaga awakened. But it was not for the Sun-Born to point out the Taiga. Kirke's companion would express herself when and how she chose, in her own little room of wood and straw and blood and bone.

  “The rats still feel free,” came the muttering, hissed through the iron teeth. The slate-gray eyes kept searching, though they never stayed anywhere for long, except to occasionally meet Kirke's own golden ones.

  “Then let your cats out. At least we have her assurances that the Otherthings will not be a prolonged disturbance in your territory,” Kirke said. Kirke did not like beginning any sentence with 'At least.' She did not like many things about this Glorious New Beginning.

  That shared irritation seemed much more of import to Baba Yaga than the physical. “What witch is so beholden?” Baba Yaga asked.

  That was the crux of it: that their coven-mate played handmaiden to an Otherlord—and that it had worked for her. After all the amusing failed attempts, after all the supposed inevitability of heroes, it had actually worked, and it was apparently what the next thousand years—at least—were going to be about.

  Kirke nodded, sighing. “Already, she flits back to him.”

  As she spoke, Kirke thought she heard the sound of something hitting the roof. She chose not to comment. Perhaps it was a branch, as the house stepped its way among trees at times. Perhaps it was one of Baba Yaga's literal or figurative cats. Or perhaps it was some other habit, or something else would be revealed. At any rate, the Sun-Born would not comment on the Taiga.

  She waited in thought for a moment, then smiled thinly. “Still, it is good to see the world afraid.”

  An affirming sound came in turn.

  “We must simply hope this … scourging of humanity is worth the condescensions, the expectations of 'little favors' for both her and her … I will not even say the word,” Kirke said.

  Baba Yaga just scratched.

  Kirke frowned slightly, but shook it off. “Yes, there are indeed frustrations, but we must deal with the matter as it is.”

  “About that, ladies...” came a voice that was most definitely not the cat.

  Rats, in fact, from the bedraggled, scarred, and dirty look of them. Not those of Rhalissa's allies, as she'd assumed earlier, but rats, yes. Even when half-beaten, half-starved, and half-frozen, they still somehow made their way into the larder of those that would sic the cats—and poisons and traps—on them. No, not the larder, these rats. Garden rats in from the cold, from the white flowers with black roots they held. Moly—no wonder she hadn't sensed sign of them.

  Now, though, a great deal was made much clearer. The one in the lead, the youngest, was all focus, defiance, and a readiness to take some first, imagined strike from the witches. He was small but compact, steel springs under the surface, and she could see something bright and brittle behind those eyes. Even were he not protected, a pig is not what she would have turned the boy into.

  Kirke knew all about mortals in skins they weren't born to. The Japanese... yes, Japanese little-giantess in green armor was one of those. A divine transformation, meant to elevate rather than, as was Kirke's preference, simplify. A little girl walking on sacred stilts, no doubt with hair-trigger reflexes, was anything but simple and would be a threat, too, if any such thing could be here.

  The other girl, with brown skin and matted curls, didn't belong here. Her calluses were from plowshares, not swords. And she most definitely didn't have enough calluses on her soul to be in the middle of what was coming.

  And then there was the rat who knew Greek, who spoke it through a mask, a mask that was almost a bandage for the incurable. He was behind this, and not only in the sense that his broken form hid behind the physically stronger. His was the voice that had spoken, and clearly he had made the decision to come out of hiding. Almost a shame that it would likely get them all killed. Almost.

  The scaled limbs and yellow eye at first made her think Rhalissa had left pets, but a second thought told her that wasn't right at all. She'd heard of Tainted lines in stalwartly human families, of traditions that welcomed the supernatural edge to use against its origin. Except when they didn't.

  “I thought the people of the Gisting killed those born crippled by the Otherblood,” she finally said.

  “They stopped,” the boy said. “Quite some time ago.”

  Kirke exchanged a glance with Baba Yaga before returning her gaze to the boy. “We have difficulty keeping up with fashion.”

  “I'm sure, and I was hoping to talk to you both on the subject of rapid changes.”

  “Well, you have clearly taken care that you will not be turned into pigs. Impressive, but I've been impressed before.” Dark memories came with that, memories of moly-flowers and of heroes, but Kirke remained physically impassive. “And some people like their pork...taller.” She could see Baba Yaga eyeing the armored girl, perhaps sizing her for the oven door. “And are even less picky about their pet food,” Kirke added, looking back to the masked boy. “How did you get in?”

  “Climbed trees to the back window. Well, to be honest, I was dragged by people who were climbing trees. Hobie, please tell Baba Yaga sorry for the trespassing. Just for that.”

  The youngest relayed the message in proper Russian, and Baba Yaga replied in that language. Kirke smiled and let the bear-child translate. “She says we already made the call to...um...spin the wheel, Nils.”

  The children looked confused, as if some sort of joke had been made in the tension, but Kirke just smiled. Baba Yaga indeed never made a habit of direct involvement with or against anyone who did not start something. But showing up at her house was always starting some
thing, for good or ill to the arrival.

  “I believe there's an old Russian story about not using a bear as a flyswatter, or something like that,” the masked boy said in Latin, trying to meet eyes with each of them but also with the dark and delicate girl, as if trying to reassure.

  That got the raise of a gnarled finger and a hiss through iron teeth of “Only Mostly.”

  “I'll talk fast.”

  Kirke exchanged looks with Baba Yaga again. The crone made no move to act on culinary impulses yet, so that meant they were hearing them out.

  “So you've received, or perhaps woken up to, quite a lot of news at once,” the masked boy said. “And it sounds like you figure you just have to accept it and enjoy the perks of having connections in the new order. But really, a sorceress who isn't even her own source has gotten a bit too grandiose, hasn't she?”

  “And I presume you think we should let you go teach her a lesson? You would die. Rhalissa cares nothing for moly-flowers,” Kirke said.

  “But you care. You've had thousands of years to seek out some other practice of mysticism somebody couldn't disrupt with a single plant, but you still do the kind you invented yourself, don't you? Because you have to be what you are, right?” He paused, then looked at the Japanese girl. For some reason, he had switched to English. “And I've got to be who I am.” He tossed the flower to the girl, who caught it with a look of shock, as he stepped closer to them. “I'm here to negotiate in good faith. Either I convince the two of you that complacency about Xharomor's ascension is not entirely in your best interests, or I don't.” A breath. “And here's hoping I'll look as good as I can doing it.”

  Though he was vulnerable to either of them now, Kirke did not lift a hand yet. She'd had her own views, once upon a time, of what 'looked good' from the wily, the subtle, and the bold. “He's going to be entertaining for a while,” she told Baba Yaga and received no objection.

  “Do you really think Xharomor is going to leave Russia alone?” The masked boy posed his first question to Baba Yaga, but was clever enough not to wait for an answer. “Otherlords divide and conquer. Play both sides against the middle. You'd be in the middle. If Xharomor were capable of being satisfied with what he has, he wouldn't have spent millennia trying to tear into and invade this facet of reality, our facet of reality.”