by Max Candee
“What happened then?” I asked. I didn’t want us to waste our time playing guessing games; I wanted to know everything I could be told.
Uncle Misha sighed. “Well, your parents stayed here for some time. Sereda was … in shock, I suppose you could say. She had never known any other life than living with her mother, and she had never faced anybody’s anger before. You must understand that your mother was the kindest person I have ever met. But sometimes kindness is paid for with trust, and Sereda had too much of that. When that trust was broken … she did not know how to react. She did not know what to think, what to feel.
“I told you she lay motionless for three days. She did. Then she slept for three more. When she awoke, she wept. Quietly, without a sound, but constantly. I almost wondered if she was mute. And when she did start to speak again, all she said were questions that almost broke my heart. ‘Where is my mother?’ she asked. ‘She must still love me. What did I do?’ She was utterly lost.”
Lauraleigh and I didn’t have to look at each other to know what we were each thinking, but we did anyway. We’d heard those questions before; even asked them ourselves. Every time a new orphan came to the orphanage, we heard those questions. The feeling that it must have been your fault you had been abandoned or your parents had died. Yet with the insistence that you’d be found, that your parents were searching for you and would find you eventually, if only you were good. Those feelings never quite left you.
“We did what we could to help,” Uncle Misha said, breaking into our thoughts. “Well, me especially. Koschey was almost useless; he had never been very good at comforting people, and besides, he had hardly gotten his strength back either. It was a long recovery. The animals helped, though. Your mother loved animals, Anna Sophia. They would come right up to her hands without fear. She would let ermines run up her arms and tickle her nose with their tails, and birds would settle on her shoulders and chatter at her as if telling her secrets. Then she would laugh, and I would catch a glimpse of the happy girl she must have been. She liked the bears, too. Especially the bears. Sometimes she would even spend the night with them. I think they made her feel safe. Indeed she felt comforted, wrapped in their arms, in the warmth and softness of their fur.
“Slowly she stopped being quite so distraught. She did not become glad, but her tears dried and she stopped asking the questions she knew couldn’t be answered. And when she looked at Koschey, there was an expression on her face that said it had all been worth it.
“I kept my ear to the ground, of course. All those I talked to concurred; Baba Yaga had withdrawn even further into the woods. No one knew why, but she had almost disappeared from view. Naturally, this disturbed people who wanted to know what she was plotting. But eventually, it became the new way of things. So much so that your father and mother felt it was safe to leave my cabin and go to Koschey’s home.”
Uncle Misha heaved a great sigh.
“I will not deny I was somewhat glad. I like my solitude well enough. And perhaps I was more worried than I had let on. I would never have refused Koschey, of course, particularly not after seeing him in the state he had been in when he had arrived here. But even for me, it was better not to get on the bad side of the Boney-Legged One.”
“So what happened then?” asked Lauraleigh. “It sounds like the moment when you’re supposed to say ‘They lived happily ever after,’ but it isn’t, is it?”
“No,” said Uncle Misha gravely, “it is not. Though then again, perhaps for you, it is. For if the story had ended there, you and Anna would never have met.”
Lauraleigh looked shocked. “That doesn’t mean I wish that — well, that whatever happened next had happened! How can you suggest that?”
“No,” Uncle Misha said, and I thought I caught a glint of a smile behind his beard. “Of course not, and I apologize if it seemed I was suggesting you would be glad. But … do you think you would be happier or even as happy as you are, if you did not know our Anna? No, you do not have to answer that. I am merely trying to show you… When a tree falls, it is a great pity, of course. Yet it will become a home for badgers and squirrels and food for insects that will become the food of birds. Do you see? However great the misfortune, there is something good, however small, that will come of it.”
Lauraleigh looked as though she wanted to protest, but she could find no argument.
“So what did happen?” I said timidly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but it was too late to stop now.
Uncle Misha tapped his pipe against his heel. As he continued, he began to clean and refill it.
“Humans are curious creatures,” he said. “Humans and those of us who are like them. Look at the animals. True, they love one another. But at some stage, the parents will chase the younglings away. Look at Mama Bear. Before today, you had never met any of the cubs who are with her now. When they reach the right age, she pushes them out of the den, and then they must find their own way. And it is well; they survive on their own, and if they meet their mother in the wild, they will not fight, but they will never seek her out. Birds will push their fledglings out of the nest, only weeks after they were carefully bringing them food. It would seem an unalterable law of nature. And yet for us, it is not so. We cling to our families. Even after we leave because it is our time to leave, we keep in touch, and when that link is broken, we suffer for it. But I do not need to tell you that, you who grew up in an orphanage.”
I don’t know if Lauraleigh had grabbed my hand or I had grabbed hers, but we were squeezing each other’s hands for comfort.
“It was the same with Sereda,” said Uncle Misha. “However happy she was with Koschey, no matter how much time passed, the loss of her mother had wounded her deeply. So how could we expect her to react, the day Baba Yaga sent her a letter, promising that all was well between them and begging her to visit?”
I gasped.
Uncle Misha nodded gravely.
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “You came swiftly enough when your old Uncle Misha sent you a letter asking you to visit. What would you have done, had it come from your mother?”
“So Sereda went?” said Lauraleigh.
“Yes. Much to Koschey’s fear. But he would not stop her, for he loved her too much to command her to do or not do anything. But he had two good reasons to fear. Not least because of how much he loved her. You see, sometime before — maybe not long after they had escaped from Baba Yaga, I’m not sure — he had given her the greatest proof of his love and trust in her that he could. He had given Sereda his heart.”
There was a long silence.
“I don’t understand,” I said at last.
“Neither do I,” said Lauraleigh. “That’s just a phrase people use, isn’t it? It just means you’re really in love with someone, if you give them your heart.”
Uncle Misha chuckled. “Miss Lauraleigh, you must forgive me if I laugh. I had forgotten that you are human,” he said. “And you, Malyshka, I had forgotten that you had lived so long among humans.
“No, when I say that Koschey had given Sereda his heart, I mean it quite literally. I cannot really explain it to you; it is not an area in which I am an expert. But certain beings — certain persons with enough power, like Koschey or perhaps Baba Yaga — can actually extract their hearts from their chests.
“Your heart holds your life and much of your power. Anyone who got ahold of it would be able to do anything to you: kill you, take your strength, or… I do not even know. So it is a grave matter to remove your own heart.
“But Koschey did it. I think he was worried in case he ever found himself in Baba Yaga’s power again. You see, without his heart, even if she did capture him, there was a limit to how much she could do to him. Certainly she would not be able to take over the Kingdom of the Dead, if that was her intent.”
“So even if she has him, he’s safe?” I interrupted.
“Perhaps,” said Uncle Misha. “Perhaps. We must hope so. But this was not the main reason Koschey removed his own
heart. I think he did so mostly to prove to Sereda how much he loved her, how much he had faith in her. To let her know she was that cherished, that trusted. After having been abandoned by her mother, it must have meant the world to her.
“Koschey told her to hide it somewhere no one else would think to look, and to tell no one — not even him — where it was. That way, if Baba Yaga captured him, even he could not tell her where his heart was. However, if Sereda ever turned against him, he would be entirely in her power. That was how much he trusted her.
“Yet he was still worried when she received that letter from her mother. However much he trusted her, he still worried that Baba Yaga might manage to trick Sereda into telling. He felt certain that Baba Yaga had discovered that he had removed his heart and Sereda knew where it was hidden. Well. He need not have worried. As it turned out, Sereda loved him more than she did her mother. Much to her misfortune.”
Silence fell over us once again. Uncle Misha seemed reluctant to go on.
“What was the other reason?” Lauraleigh suddenly asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The second reason. You said Koschey had two good reasons to fear if Sereda went to visit her mother.”
“Ah, yes, so I did,” said Uncle Misha. He knocked his pipe on his boot again, added more tobacco, and lit it again. He puffed on it, closing his eyes as though he wanted to avoid what was coming next. Then he opened them and fixed his gaze directly on me.
“Sereda was with child,” he said.
Somehow, the room had grown colder. Despite the wood stove in the corner that was well lit against the evening cold, despite the coziness I had felt only moments before, the snug little room now felt like a vast, gloomy stone hall. Uncle Misha and Lauraleigh were no longer there, just fuzzy visions out of the corners of my eyes, as unreal as the patterns of the rugs hanging on the walls.
Uncle Misha was still talking, and I heard him as if I were at the bottom of a well, his voice distant and echoing, unreachable but inescapable.
“It soon became all too obvious that Sereda was a prisoner in Baba Yaga’s hut,” that deep voice went on. “Koschey was frantic, all ready to gather an army to fall on her but terrified that doing so would put Sereda — and the baby — in danger. He was paralyzed with indecision, not wishing to risk his beloved but terrified that soon Baba Yaga would break her resistance to revealing her secret and enable her to conquer him once and for all.
“But Sereda was no longer the helpless girl she had been all those years before. She had realized soon enough that she was her mother’s prisoner. She managed not to reveal her secret, to trick Baba Yaga into thinking that she was docile, she did not know. Then she escaped. No one knows how, but she did. She fled to the one place of safety she knew: the cave of the bears where she had once felt herself protected. She told no one as she nestled up against a whelping mother bear, who put her arms around her in comfort as they both groaned in childbirth. And Sereda’s daughter was born along with the mother bear’s litter of cubs. But she had been weakened by her flight, Sereda had, and by the ordeal of pregnancy and giving birth. Soon after, she died.”
I covered my mouth with my hands, but Uncle Misha went on relentlessly.
“But the mother bear took the child into her arms like one of her very own cubs and kept her warm and fed, and Sereda’s spirit appeared to the one friend she knew could help. And so the Great Trapper came to the bear cave and found there a small human child. He gathered her up and wrapped her in furs and took her to his home. And desperately though he might have wished to have his daughter with him, Koschey knew that he could not risk it. If Baba Yaga learned of her existence, she would seek to use the child just as she had used her own.
“So little Anna Sophia stayed with the Great Trapper, and she listened to fairy tales and learned how to hook a rug and catch a fish, and Koschey pretended not to know she existed. But Baba Yaga found out about you, Anna. And she has been looking for you. She has never given up on finding Koschey’s heart, and I think she believes you know where it is or you can find it.
“And now, though I do not know how they caught him, she had her Horsemen kidnap Koschey. In hopes of luring you home, I think.”
I could see the thought in Lauraleigh’s eyes: And it worked.
“I know this is not the story I told you, Anna Sophia,” Uncle Misha said. “But you were bound for Geneva one day, as per your mother’s wish, and I felt your best protection against the dark forces who would seek you out was your innocence. I would never have risked bringing you back here if the need were not great. If Baba Yaga does not release your father soon, we will all be in grave danger. Without him, souls can no longer stay in the afterlife. They cannot reach their rightful place. We are being overrun with angry, unsettled ghosts. And Baba Yaga will not release him until she has his heart, which will only make things worse. With it, she will be able to control those ghosts. Every single one of them.”
I shivered at the thought of so many ghosts haunting my beautiful home. And if Baba Yaga could control them, what kind of horrors could she unleash?
“But what can I do?” I asked in a weak voice.
“We shall see, Malyshka,” said Uncle Misha. “We shall see. But it is safer for you here with me than in Geneva, where Baba Yaga’s henchmen found you. It is safer for all of us.”
He puffed deeply on his pipe again. It seemed his tale was over.
Uncle Misha’s story swirled in my head. So many pieces of a puzzle. So many questions still unanswered.
“So you’re the Great Trapper?” I asked, remembering Gavril’s fear at the mere mention of the name.
“I am,” said Uncle Misha gravely. “Koschey would not have given himself in friendship to an ordinary man. To him, mortal men live and die in a heartbeat.”
“You’re immortal?” Lauraleigh asked with wide eyes.
He laughed. “No. Not immortal. But enduring. I have lived as long as a score or more of men, even those liars in the Caucasus who insist they all live till they’re a hundred and twenty. But the winters seem harsher to me now. Even in the summers, my bones ache in the mornings. One day, I will enter the land of the dead just like everyone else, and there will be another Great Trapper, somewhere, who will take my place. But you, my darling Malyshka, may not be so lucky.”
“Me?”
Uncle Misha put down his pipe. The fire had burned low, leaving only a red glow to light our faces.
“You, Anna Sophia, are Koschey’s heir. It is said he cannot die. But should something happen to him, should he no longer be able to fulfill his duties, you will inherit his kingdom. With all the power and responsibilities that come with it. You will become the Deathless One.”
Chapter 6
Dear Diary,
My mother’s name is Sereda. My father is Koschey, and I’m the heir to the kingdom of the dead.
I write these words down to make them feel real. It still seems so impossible, like a fairy tale that Uncle Misha spun around a campfire. Maybe, when I meet my father, he’ll seem real. For now … he’s nothing more than a shadow.
Lauraleigh refuses to go home. I know I must continue on my journey. I must find my father, as much for his safety and the world’s as for my sanity. But it will be dangerous, and I don’t want Lauraleigh caught up in this strange family feud. From what Uncle Misha says, my granny can pack a mean punch.
But Lauraleigh says she will see this through. “I was looking for adventure, after all,” she said.
Adventure. Right. This isn’t the same as backpacking across Europe and staying in youth hostels while visiting museums and attending concerts. That’s the kind of adventure I wish for her. Instead, I’ve invited her along to storm a witch’s home and possibly visit the kingdom of the dead. What teenage girl wouldn’t beg for such a trip?
* * *
We had no time to waste. Every day my father was held captive, more souls were entering death without being able to find their rightful place in the afterlife. I th
ought of the ghostly figures I’d seen in the forest and wondered if those were lost souls.
“Could be,” Uncle Misha said. “Though I have not seen any this far up the mountain. I expect villages and towns see a lot more.”
I shuddered, thinking that the cities could soon be smothered in a fog of the dead. We had to find my father fast.
After some discussion, we decided that the best course of action was to go to the source.
“You understand that we cannot just walk up to Baba Yaga’s house and demand to see Koschey,” Uncle Misha said. “She has wards — powerful magic, like booby traps — set up all around her place.”
“But we need to know if she’s keeping him there, Monsieur Michel,” said Lauraleigh. “We don’t have to ring her doorbell, but we should at least scout the house and the surrounding area.”
I nodded in agreement. “Even if Koschey isn’t there, we need to learn as much about our enemy as possible.”
Uncle Misha sighed and gave me another of his sad smiles. “Your enemy, huh? It pains me to hear you speak of your grandmother in such a way.”
“You mean old Iron Teeth?” I asked. “How else should I think of her? She kidnapped my father and made my mother die in a bear’s den. And she tried to kidnap me too! Her Black Horseman stole children from our town. Who knows how many they had taken before I stopped them? And what did she do with those children?”
Uncle Misha’s face looked bleak. I suspected he knew exactly what Baba Yaga did with children but he wasn’t about to tell me. I remembered what Lauraleigh had told me about the myths, and my mind conjured up the story of Hansel and Gretel. Ugh.
“Just remember,” he said. “She is your blood almost as much as Koschey is. Maybe we can find some advantage in that.”
I decided not to remind Uncle Misha about the shadow that grew inside me every time I used my magic for evil. How many people had Baba Yaga hurt with her magic? How black were the shadows in her heart? I’d never let the shadows take over as she likely had.