The Republic of Birds

by Jessica Miller

  ‘Baba Basha is Headmistress of Bleak Steppe, and, yes, one of Tsarina Pyotrovna’s Imperial Coven,’ says Mijska. ‘You can’t go until she feels you’re ready.’

  I stand, scraping back my chair. I don’t care what Baba Basha feels—I feel ready to leave right now. ‘Take me to see her,’ I say. ‘She’ll understand why I need to leave. I know she will!’

  ‘Baba Basha is very understanding,’ says Mijska slowly. ‘She will see you when the time is right.’

  I start to realise how hopeless the situation is. My lip wobbles and a hot tear spills down my cheek.

  Mijska spies it before I can brush it away. ‘There, there, dear,’ she says, ‘it’s not as bad as you might think.’

  ‘Not as bad for me maybe,’ I snap. ‘But what about for Mira? I don’t know where she is or if she’s even…’ I trail off. If she’s even alive, I meant to say, but the words are too awful to speak out loud.

  Mijska’s forehead wrinkles in thought and at last she says, ‘Perhaps there’s something we can try. Follow me.’

  We go out of the dining room, down a long corridor, and up a spiral staircase to a door with a brass knob in the shape of a bear’s head. I reach for the knob and Mijska swats my hand away at the same time as the bear snaps its eyes open and bares its teeth. Mijska leans down and whispers something to the bear. It brings its lips back down over its teeth, and Mijska opens the door. I step past warily. It might be a doorknob bear, but its growl was fierce and its teeth looked sharp.

  I step inside, into a large circular room with a high domed roof. From floor to ceiling, the walls are lined with books—old leather books with worn spines and gold-embossed titles. On the shelf nearest me I see Mediums: From Appleseeds to Zithers and True Tales of the Tsarish Yagas.

  ‘This is Baba Basha’s private library,’ says Mijska. ‘It’s most irregular for a student to be invited in here. But given your circumstances, I’ll make an exception. Now’—she walks to the table in the centre of the room—‘there might be a way for you to see Mira.’

  I follow her. ‘How?’ I ask. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m not going to do anything,’ she says and she unfurls a piece of paper and lays it across the table.

  I step closer and my pulse quickens. It’s not a piece of paper. It’s a map.

  ‘I know you’re not yet practised in your medium,’ says Mijska, ‘but you can try to find Mira in this map.’

  My hands are already hovering over the map, but I feel a twinge of uncertainty. ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ I admit, but even as I say it I’m stretching out to touch Ptashkagrad.

  Right away I taste gritty, snow-flecked air and hear the loud beating of wings. First, I see snow-capped mountains, but before they have properly come into focus, they fall away, and I see flat, frost-bitten plains. The scene changes again. Now I see a city in the distance, and I know it must be Ptashkagrad, but however hard I try, I can’t move any closer to it. And then it is gone, and all I can see is a snow-covered forest.

  My eyes are running, and my head is starting to ache. I seem to be lost in the snow, but just as I am about to pull away, the scene shifts once more, and I see her.

  She is in a golden cage, balanced on the rooftops of Ptashkagrad. Behind her are looming clouds. Before her an audience of birds: some hang in the sky and some perch on the roof tiles. She is dancing, but I can see she takes no pleasure in it. Her face is grim, and her cheeks are tear-stained. She dances as if her legs are very heavy, dragging her feet on the floor of the cage. But she dances beautifully. I ache looking at her. I have the feeling she has been dancing for a very long time.

  I want to see more but the scene falls away. Next, I see an abandoned village, a frozen lake, a windblown tree, the images kaleidoscoping one after another in front of my eyes. I don’t know how to find my way back to Mira.

  Mijska gently lifts my hands away from the map. Her touch brings me back into the library. ‘I saw her,’ I say, ‘but only for a moment. I tried to see more but I couldn’t.’

  ‘You can’t control it yet,’ says Mijska, ‘but you’ll soon learn.’

  Not soon enough, I think. Even after just a few days Mira is terribly changed. She looks gaunt and sad and, worst of all, resigned. Has she given up hope? ‘I wish I didn’t have to learn,’ I mutter. ‘I wish I wasn’t a yaga at all!’

  Mijska raises an eyebrow. I feel myself flush. ‘I only mean that if I wasn’t a yaga, I wouldn’t be stuck here. If I were an ordinary girl, I’d be in the Republic of Birds now, or well on my way,’ I say.

  ‘But you are a yaga,’ says Mijska. ‘Simple as that. There’s nothing ordinary about you. You may think that is unfortunate but, mark my words, it is not. If you weren’t a yaga, you’d have no hope of finding your sister. The Republic is dangerous, Olga. Ptashka III is cruel and her army is powerful. Without magic you wouldn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘So…I need magic to rescue Mira?’ I say.

  Mijska sighs heavily. ‘You’ll need a lot more than that,’ she says. ‘But it’s a start.’ She walks towards the door.

  ‘Baba Mijska,’ I say, and she turns around. ‘I’ve seen Mira now, and I don’t know how much longer she’ll survive like this. I don’t have time to spare. What if Baba Basha won’t see me until it’s too late?’

  Mijska smiles. ‘You needn’t worry about Baba Basha,’ she says. ‘Her timing is impeccable.’

  The dormitory is a high, narrow room lit by lanterns that cast a thin glow. I see that there are twelve beds and each one, save for the one closest the door, is occupied by a sleeping girl. A sleeping yaga.

  ‘There’s a basin and jug for washing.’ Mijska points to them. ‘This bed is yours,’ she says, nodding at the empty one. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Olga, when your lessons will begin in earnest.’ She creeps through the door and goes to shut it behind her, but then she stops. ‘We’re glad to have you at Bleak Steppe, Olga,’ she says. ‘Even if you’re not glad to be here.’

  While the sleeping yagas snore gently around me, I scrub myself clean with water from the jug and climb into the grey nightdress I find folded at the end of my bed. It feels so good to be clean, to be lying under a warm blanket. But I can’t sleep.

  I reach for Varvara’s memory bag. Baba Basha may not want to see me yet, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to see her. I open the memory bag and dip my fingers into the inky liquid. The dormitory starts to ripple around its edges and I wander through Varvara’s memories: a feast for Tsarina Pyotrovna’s birthday, a crowded afternoon in the banya, a hurried carriage ride with the clip-clop of horse hooves hard against cobbled streets while the Stone Palace grows smaller and smaller through the carriage window. Sometimes, I see Baba Basha, but only ever in the corner of a scene, or on her way out the door, and always partly obscured by a rain-speckled mist or haloed with grey storm clouds. Even in Varvara’s memories, she is elusive.

  Finally, I find my way out of the memories, back into the dormitory and the narrow bed. I suppose I drift off into sleep after that because the next thing I’m aware of is a hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The River Dezhdy

  ‘OLGA?’ SAYS A voice in my ear. ‘Olga Oblomova?’

  I open my eyelids a crack. ‘How does everyone here know my name?’ I mumble into my pillow.

  ‘But don’t you know me?’ says the voice. I rub my eyes and sit up. The voice belongs to a small girl with a crooked mouth and very long, nimble fingers. I recognise her from the Instructionary Institute.

  ‘It’s me—Evgenia Kokoschka,’ says Evgenia Kokoschka as she sits beside me on the bed and starts lacing her shoes.

  ‘Of course,’ I say to Evgenia, ‘You were to be a sextant in the Grand Procession at the Spring Blossom Ball.’

  ‘That’s right. I was to represent all Tsarina Pyotrovna’s great naval advances,’ she says.

  ‘And then one day, there was a space between Albina and Jelena in the Procession,
where you were supposed to be. We all noticed. We all guessed what happened. But no one said anything.’

  She smiles. ‘It happened at the Stone Palace, actually, during one of our Spring Blossom rehearsals,’ she says. ‘I went down the wrong corridor, opened the wrong door, walked into the wrong room. The door was locked, you see. Locked and bolted. But I just opened it and walked right through. Locks,’ she says, wiggling her fingers, ‘are my medium.’

  ‘Mine is maps,’ I say, and I swing my feet onto the floor. ‘I have to learn quickly. When do our lessons start?’

  ‘Right after breakfast,’ she says.

  Last night the dining hall was empty and so quiet that Mijska’s and my footsteps echoed loudly off the walls. This morning it is like stepping into a different room entirely. The air is loud with the clatter of plates and the chink of spoons and talking and laughing. The benches are crowded with girls—yagas—eating pancakes, taking turns to plait each other’s hair, reading textbooks under the table.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Evgenia asks, and before I can answer, she says, ‘Doesn’t really matter if you are or not. Magic is famishing, especially when you’re only beginning, like you are.’ Evgenia tips her head up. ‘Sausages, please,’ she says. ‘And bread and cheese and jam.’ Rain falls from the domed ceiling and becomes sausages and bread and cheese and jam as it hits the table.

  I chew my bread without saying anything, but Evgenia is happy to fill the silence with chatter.

  ‘Maps,’ says Evgenia, while I eat. ‘That’s a good medium. Do you remember Zenia?’ She points down the table to a tall, thin girl. ‘The one who was so frighteningly good at maths? Well, that’s precisely why she was sent here—her medium is the abacus. And’—she points again—‘do you see Katia from the year above us? Well, don’t get too close to her in class,’ she says. ‘Her medium is bees.’

  At last she looks at me and says, ‘You’re very quiet, Olga. It all seems strange here at first, but you’ll soon get used to it.’

  I nod. I have no intention of getting used to Bleak Steppe. I think of Mira dancing in her horrible cage. I’m impatient for my lessons to begin.

  At last, a bell rings and all around me girls stand up from their places. Mijska sweeps through the dining hall in a shimmering silver cloak. She looks different—almost stern—as she opens the classroom door.

  I step through the door into a vast empty room—or, not quite empty. Along one wall is a glass chest. It looks like one of the specimen cabinets from the Tsarish Museum of Science and Progress, the kind that is usually filled with semi-precious stones or dead beetles pinned onto pieces of card and neatly labelled with their Latin names. But this case isn’t filled with insect specimens. The girls file up to the chest. I watch as Evgenia takes a padlock from it. Zenia comes away with an abacus and Katia with a cloud of bees. By the time I reach the chest, there is only one thing left inside: a neatly furled map. I lift it out.

  When I turn back from the chest, most of the other pupils are already at work. Katia is trying to coax her bees into the shape of a pentagram. Zenia holds her unstrung abacus in her lap while, in the air above her, the abacus beads float in strange constellations. Another girl is muttering grimly at the ink pooled in her cupped hands, though it doesn’t seem to be listening to anything she says. It’s Polina. I remember her too.

  Mijska moves through the girls, correcting here and encouraging there.

  ‘Polina,’ she says, ‘another unlucky day? Never mind, it will come with practice.’

  She stops and watches Zenia approvingly. ‘Very nice,’ she says, ‘though I believe Orion’s belt is missing a bead.’

  I find a place clear of bees and ink and unroll my map across the floor. I am ready to begin. I need to find out more about Mira, about how I can find her.

  I place my hands over Ptashkagrad and…nothing. I wait. All I feel under my palms is paper. I press my fingers so hard into the map they come away ink-stained, but nothing happens. Nothing, unless you count the faint smell of smoke and—once—the gritty taste of ash at the back of my throat. I am leaning over the map, so close my nose almost touches the seam where the High Stikhlos meet the edge of the Republic, when two silver-pointed shoes appear at the side of the map.

  ‘Now, Olga,’ comes Mijska’s voice from above. ‘Perhaps you are trying too hard.’

  ‘My sister is in danger,’ I mutter.

  Mijska gathers her skirts and sits down beside me. ‘To start with,’ she says gently, ‘why don’t you begin by focusing on a part of the map that’s less…fraught. Strong feelings can muddle your magic, especially when you are starting out. Try a more neutral territory.’ She guides my hands down to a blue line that trickles down through the map’s east before it meets the Squalid Seas. ‘The River Dezhdy,’ she says, ‘looks a good place to begin.’

  I press my index finger halfway along the river. First, nothing. Then, a slimy creep at the back of my throat. I taste something muddy and green and faintly vegetable. I think it’s the river. I press my finger down harder, so hard it turns red around the nail and white around the knuckle. Apart from the river slowly rising at the back of my throat, nothing changes.

  ‘I can taste it,’ I tell Mijska. ‘But that’s all.’

  ‘That’s not all!’ she says. ‘That’s your way in!’

  ‘What do you mean, my way in?’ I say. I gag on the taste of river and pull my hand away from the map.

  She thinks for a moment. ‘You know, every medium is different, Olga, and every medium must be learned differently. But what’s in a map—what makes a map? All the impressions and observations and memories of the person who drew it. This taste—this impression—you need to follow it.’

  ‘Well, how do I do that?’ I ask. But Mijska has already walked away. I watch her, swishing a silvery path through her students, and then I go back to the map. I touch my finger to the river.

  Again, the taste of it wells up in my mouth, cold and thick with silt. I want to spit it out, but I stay with it. The taste creeps up into my nose, so that I’m smelling it, too. The smell is harder to pin down than the taste: it dances between a clean, glassy scent and a reek, something foul and brackish. Now and again, I catch the faint tang of engine oil. This must come from the barges that go up and down the river. By the time the Dezhdy meets the Neva in Stolitsa, it’s crowded with barges loaded with timber and coal and sacks of grain.

  The smell of river water cut through with engine oil reminds me of crossing the Krimsky Bridge on winter afternoons when I wanted to take the short way home from the Instructionary Institute for Girls. The rails of the bridge would be slick with ice, and the acrid oil would wrinkle my nose while I leaned over the bridge’s railing. I liked to watch the barges, all lit by lanterns in the winter gloom, as they went downstream on their way to the port city of Myrkutsk, and even out to sea.

  I hear the burble of the river and the crack and sway of the rushes at its banks almost at the same time as I feel it, ice-cold water rushing between my fingers and slithery tangles of weeds. The river fills my mouth and my nose and my ears and my hands and if I can just push a little further—

  But as I push, the water slips away from my fingers and soon I hear its ripples only as faint echoes. My mouth tastes of nothing except saliva. And all I smell is the damp rainy smell of Bleak Steppe.

  The classroom falls back into focus around me. I feel dizzy and disoriented but somehow triumphant. I am starting to feel that magic is something that I can make happen. And if I learn to do it well enough, it will bring me closer to Mira.

  I go back to the Dezhdy. This time, it all happens quicker. I taste the river and soon the rest of it falls into place. I stay very still, inside the Dezhdy’s smell and sound and feel. I notice everything: the soft clucking sounds of pebbles being tumbled over one another, the croaking of frogs, just like the frogs in the fountains at the Mikhailovsky Gardens, the silky feel of the riverbed. And, at last, I see it, too.

  I’m not the only one who sees it.r />
  The other pupils gasp and duck away as the River Dezhdy, fringed with grass and thick with fish and weeds, pours out of the map and into the room.

  Soon, the whole classroom is filled with silty water and girls are climbing onto windowsills and clinging to curtains, trying to stay out of its swirling currents. I should stop, now. But I have never felt powerful like this before, and I don’t want the feeling to end.

  A barge, laden with logs, pours out of the map and hurtles down the river, leaving screaming girls in its wake.

  I take my hand from the map. My fingers tremble, ever so slightly, as the room falls back into place. The other girls stare until Mijska claps her hands and says, ‘Now girls, there’s no need to stop what you’re doing,’ as if there hadn’t been an entire river flowing through the classroom not five seconds ago. Slowly, they return to their own mediums. All except for Evgenia Kokoschka. She comes over to me, rattling with keys and locks. Her eyes are shining. ‘Olga,’ she says, ‘you’re really good!’

  I stare at her as her words replay, over and over, in my ears. I, Olga Oblomova, am really good.

  ‘Olga?’ she says. ‘You’re looking at me kind of… strangely. Are you feeling well?’

  ‘I’m feeling perfectly well.’ I smile. ‘It’s just that no one’s ever said that to me before.’

  At lunch, I sit with Evgenia and Katia and Polina and Zenia. They chatter excitedly, and Polina wiggles her ink-stained fingers to make the others giggle. They seem happy to be here, happy to be yagas. If I had come to Bleak Steppe under different circumstances, I would have been happy here, too. I push the thought away. Soon, lunch will be over, and lessons will begin again. I will work twice as hard—I won’t waste any time.

  To my dismay, the next lesson is something called History of Magic. I nudge Evgenia. ‘Are we really learning history?’ I whisper.

  ‘Practice in the morning, theory in the afternoon,’ she whispers back.

  I bite down a groan. Theory won’t prepare me for the Republic of Birds. Theory won’t help me get Mira back.