Anya and the Dragon

by Sofiya Pasternack

  “Um,” Anya said, about to decline, but Ivan cut off any response she could make.

  “Yes!” Ivan ran out of the room, then ran back in. “I’ll get my books!” he said, and ran out again.

  Anya’s eyes grew wide. She didn’t want Ivan to know where her house was. Then he’d know she lied to him. He would know her family was about to lose their home.

  “Gospodin Yedinitsa, I can’t learn about dragons today,” Anya said, edging out the door. “I, uh . . .” She bent and grabbed her package of fish. “I have to cook my fish before it spoils!”

  “What?” Yedsha said. “But it’s important!”

  “I know,” Anya said, hurrying down the stairs. “I’ll come back later.”

  “Today?”

  “Tomorrow!” Anya dashed out the front and up to the road, ignoring Ivan’s voice calling after her.

  * * *

  Anya didn’t stop running until she got to her property. Then she panted as she trudged into the barn and pulled open the cellar door. Down the stairs, the natural cavern beneath the barn welcomed her with a cool breeze. It came from the well that accessed an underground arm of the Sogozha River. The well itself was twice as wide as Anya’s shoulders and shallow, reaching only about a foot before it hit the fresh, clear water of the river. The water bubbled past the stones that Dyedka had built around the well’s mouth, creating a low wall. She set the fish package down on the wall, where it would stay chilled until she was ready to cook it.

  On the opposite side of the cellar, a wooden crate shielded a bowl full of challah dough from the brunt of the river’s chill. During the summer, they kept the dough and yeast culture in the cellar so it didn’t get too hot. In the winter, they kept it inside the house so it didn’t get too cold. Yeast was very fussy about temperature.

  Anya hoisted the bowl, careful not to knock down too much of the dough’s rise. She walked up the cellar steps with it, heading to the kitchen, inside the house. The oven was probably already heating—​that was something the house spirit took care of—​so all Anya had to do was break off a piece of the dough to save a yeast culture for next week.

  She stopped dead in the middle of the yard, groaning. She had left the bag of flour at Widow Medvedeva’s home, with Ivan’s foolish family.

  “Great,” she muttered as she started walking again. She’d save the culture and put it back in the cellar, then get the bread baking and go pick up the flour. Easy.

  The doors and windows of the house were all open to vent the oven’s heat. The domovoi sat on the top step leading up to the door, fanning himself with a leaf.

  Anya paused to glance down at the house spirit. “Do you want to help me knead?”

  He sighed and flopped back against the floor.

  Anya laughed at him and continued inside. The domovoi appeared on the countertop, which had been cleaned since Babulya’s potion-making adventure that morning. He centered the kippah on his head, patted it once it was settled, then stretched out his arms toward the bowl. Anya gave the counter a cursory brush before she let the dough glomp out into a sticky heap.

  The domovoi rolled up his sleeves and then dug his hands into the dough, kneading it with the might of his entire body. Anya plucked a fistful of dough and returned it to the bowl. While the domovoi kneaded, Anya went back outside and returned the bowl to its cool spot in the barn cellar.

  Inside, the domovoi continued his energetic kneading. The dough was starting to form up more, be less sticky, and roll easily. Anya let him rest for a moment and poked the ball with one finger. Some of the dough stuck to her skin, so she shook her head. “Not yet. Almost.”

  With a sigh, the domovoi leaned back into the kneading, and then someone knocked on the open door.

  The domovoi looked up and bared his teeth. Anya didn’t turn around right away. The only knocks on that door recently were bad ones. The last knock that Anya had heard had been the conscription officer coming to take Papa away four months ago. Her stomach knotted at the memory.

  But she couldn’t just stand there while someone waited on the steps. Slowly, she turned, and her stomach knotted further at Ivan’s silhouette in the doorway.

  “Hi, Anya,” he said.

  Anya approached him. “Ivan, what are you . . . ?” She got closer, and the bundle of books under one arm and her flour sack under the other became clearer. “Oh.”

  He lingered on the stoop, eyebrows pulled into a concerned W. “I asked some people in the village where you lived.”

  Anya shifted on her feet. She crossed her arms. “Here.”

  “You said there weren’t houses north of the river.”

  “I lied.” Anya scratched her nose. “I didn’t want you to know.”

  “Why?”

  She pointed to the bag under his arm. “Can I just have my flour?”

  Ivan looked down at the sack, then up at her. “I brought my dragon books. So I could teach you.”

  “I’m making bread,” Anya said.

  He perked and peeked past her. “Really? Can I help?”

  “Do you even know how to make bread?” Anya asked.

  “Yeah!” He hurried in and set the flour sack on the floor, and slid the books onto a clear spot on the counter. Too late, Anya realized that Ivan might be able to see the domovoi. Usually, only family members could. But he was a fool, and magical, and—​

  The domovoi glared at Ivan’s books, then shot a particularly hateful look at Ivan. But Ivan didn’t react. If the domovoi did something like push Ivan’s books off the counter or throw something at him, Ivan might get mad. He said his family was there to get rid of magical creatures. Did that include domoviye? But Ivan just stood over the smoothing lump of dough, stared at it, and said, “Do we put it in the oven now?” Anya let out her held breath. He couldn’t see her domovoi after all. The house spirit turned his glare to Anya, and she shook her head. He vanished without further fuss.

  Anya joined Ivan. “You have no idea how to make bread.”

  “Fine, I don’t, but you lied to me first.”

  She glanced at him, guilty about lying. Was he mad? He was . . . smiling at her? She risked a smile in return. “Fair.” She grabbed the dough and began kneading it. “I’m almost done with this part. The kneading. If you don’t knead it, your bread will be flat and tough.”

  “Flat and tough,” Ivan said. “Got it.”

  “It’s done if you can do this.” She pulled a ball off one side and stretched it out into a thin sheet. “If the dough breaks when you stretch it thin, you need to keep kneading.” Her dough held, though. “This is ready. It didn’t break.”

  “Do you have bread magic?” Ivan asked.

  Her mouth dried up at the memory of him almost catching her using magic. “I don’t think that’s a thing,” Anya said. “But no. I don’t have any magic.” She cleared her throat and added, “No one here uses magic.”

  “Oh,” Ivan said. “I guess that’s true. So if the dough is ready, do we bake it now?”

  “It has to rise now,” Anya said. She shaped the dough into a ball and set it in the middle of the counter. “When it’s twice as big as it is now, we can braid it.”

  “Braid it? Like hair?”

  Anya laughed. “Kinda.”

  “How long does that take?” Ivan said.

  Anya shrugged. “It takes as long as it takes.”

  Ivan brightened. “While we’re waiting, we can read my books!” He snatched the books from the counter and slid into a seat at their little table. “You’ve got a lot to learn.”

  Anya wiped her hands off on her apron as she joined him. When she sat, he said, “Oh, here.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a handful of rubles.

  “For what?” Anya asked, almost breathless.

  “Because Papa said he’d give you ten rubles a day to help,” Ivan said. When she didn’t take the money right away, he wiggled his hand side to side.

  Anya took the rubles and slipped them into her pocket, the weight there somehow eve
n heavier than the horseshoes from earlier.

  “These all have information about dragons in them,” Ivan said, pulling a book from the stack and thumbing through it. “My brothers mess them up. Like here.” He showed Anya a beautifully rendered drawing of a fairy of some kind. Someone had inked a pair of crude breasts onto the fairy’s chest, and Ivan frowned as he looked at the graffiti on his book. “I can’t believe Pyatsha did this,” he muttered.

  Pyatsha. If Ivan’s father was also Yedinitsa, and Ivan was also Vosmyorka, then Pyatsha must have been short for Pyatyorka: “Number Five.” Which was strange. Pyatsha didn’t mean “Five” or anything even close. It meant . . . “Fuzziness.” “Should I call you Vosya?”

  He shrugged. “You can. They all call me Vosya or Ivanushka.”

  Anya was absolutely not going to call him Ivanushka; it was much too familiar. She wouldn’t have allowed him to call her Annushka. “I think just Ivan is good for me. Which book has the most about dragons in it?”

  Ivan managed to tear his eyes away from the defaced fairy. “Oh, this one.” He put away the fairy book and pulled out an impressive tome, then opened it on the table between them. A two-page spread of an illustrated dragon practically clawed its way off the page. It was enormous, wrapping its serpentine body around the outer wall of a cavern, wings spread wide across the ceiling. Three heads with three faces snarled. All six eyes blazed ferociously, and one head seemed to snap teeth at them. Another head breathed a column of fire, and the third head dripped what looked like greenish poison from between its fangs.

  Ivan drew his fingers over the page. “Dobrynya Nikitich defeated this dragon and saved a princess.”

  “Dobrynya Nikitich?” Anya asked. The name was familiar, but she didn’t know much about him. She knew just Ilya Muromets, the farmer-turned-knight.

  “The bogatyr.” Ivan’s eyes shone with reverence. “He worked with my papa once, a long time ago. He’s not like the other knights. Ilya Muromets uses holy magic to smite his enemies, and Alyosha Popovich uses strength magic to crush them. But Dobrynya’s magic is . . .” He tapped his temple with a finger. “He outsmarted Zmey Gorynich.” Then he tapped the picture of the dragon. “He’s the smartest man alive.”

  Ivan smiled wide, and Anya looked back down at the drawing of the dragon. She gulped. How exactly was she supposed to help capture something like that? It had taken the smartest man alive to defeat it, and she was surrounded by the not-smartest people alive. She hoped the dragon in Zmeyreka was much smaller.

  Ivan flipped to the next page, where writing was stacked in neat lines along the paper. Anya squinted at the words. She couldn’t make any of it out. When Ivan mumbled the words on the page as he followed along with his finger, Anya realized he wasn’t speaking Russian, or Hebrew, or any language she had ever heard of.

  He tapped at one part of a paragraph. “Here. I remembered reading something about dragons and water. Primaevitas. They live in rivers when they’re small.” He cleared his throat. “There are actually a few schools of thought on dragons. Some of the old taxonomists thought they were all one species that just developed through different life stages, starting out in water, then moving to land, and eventually taking to the air.”

  He flipped past more pages stacked with strange letters until he found a drawing of one of these life stages. The first step was an egg, then beside it coiled a smallish, snaky-looking creature with tiny wings. Next to it, the winged snake had legs and breathed fire, and the next step in dragon development had three heads.

  Ivan kept flipping pages. “But others—​and I think this is the better theory—​they thought there were different subtypes of dragons, like how there are different types of magic.” The page he stopped on now had multiple types of dragons illustrated. A blue water dragon twisted through waves that splashed across the page, all fins and no wings. A red fire dragon bellowed hot flames over the water dragon’s head, its ruby eyes glittering madly. A brownish-green earth dragon roared from within a dark cave, and a white air dragon cut graceful spirals above its earthbound cousin.

  Ivan ran his fingers through his hair. “Whatever their real nature is, they’re unique among magical creatures because they aren’t limited to one kind of magic. You can find them anywhere, adapting to anything.”

  Anya lifted an eyebrow. “Does that help us catch this one?”

  “Well, kind of,” Ivan said. “We haven’t seen one flying around, and there aren’t swaths of scorched forest. So unless either of those things happens, we can assume we’re dealing with one that’s either still young enough to be confined to water, or a water dragon.”

  “What about living in a cave?” Anya asked.

  Ivan shrugged. “Are there caves around here?”

  Anya turned her face north. In her mind’s eye, she could see in the distance, off toward the west, the grayish smear of cliffs cutting through the forest.

  “There are cliffs. There are plenty of caves and crevices. Plus water. One of the Sogozha’s tributaries comes from up there.”

  “Water and caves?” Ivan said, rubbing his chin. “That sounds like a perfect dragon lair.”

  Anya smiled to herself. She was already earning the rubles in her pocket. “So what’s the best way to catch a dragon?”

  Ivan concentrated on the drawing. “I’m not sure. My father will know. He’s been doing this his whole life.”

  She wished her own father were there to answer questions about dragons. He’d probably know something. Papa always knew something about everything.

  Then a realization hit her. It was the first of the Jewish month of Sivan. In exactly one month, she would be twelve years old, and for the first time in her life, Papa wouldn’t be there to celebrate with her. What if she became a bat mitzvah and got her magic then and he missed that, too? That wasn’t something that would ever happen again.

  “Anya?” Ivan asked.

  She blinked away the burning in her eyes. “Huh?”

  “You got really quiet.” He had that worried W on his forehead again.

  “I was just thinking.” Anya got up from the table and checked on the dough. It had risen but not enough. She wiped at her eyes with her back to Ivan.

  He didn’t say anything until she returned to the table, and then he opened another book. “In this one, it theorizes that dragons aren’t magical at all but are just normal animals that ancient people thought were magical. And the legends persist to this day.”

  He yammered about the evidence that dragons had no magic, and Anya listened, her pain about Papa’s absence draining away as the afternoon wore on.

  Chapter Eight

  The dough was done rising. Ivan stood beside Anya with his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, wrestling with the dough she had given him.

  “Why won’t it . . . ?” he grumbled, trying to roll a piece of his dough into a long strand. “How did you finish so fast?”

  She had already braided and set aside one loaf. “Practice,” Anya said.

  “Are you sure you’re not using magic?” Ivan muttered.

  She laughed. “I’m sure.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Anya picked up her last piece of dough, rounded it into a ball between her palms, and then rolled her hands back and forth. The dough ball elongated some, and then Anya put it down on the countertop. She rolled her hands over the dough, working it out toward both its ends, until eventually it was long and snakelike.

  Ivan tried to keep up with what she was doing. His dough snake looked like it had been trampled by a horse.

  “It’s . . .” Anya paused. “Better.”

  Ivan sighed and added his lumpy strand to Anya’s row of five smooth ones. She lined them up next to one another and pinched the tops together, then started braiding the six strands together.

  Ivan watched, silent, and then he said, “Have you ever heard of Baba Yaga?”

  “Yes.” Since she was talking to a fool, she added, “But she’s just a story. She’s not real.”<
br />
  “I dunno,” Ivan said. “Mama told us stories, but I think they were real. Like how Baba Yaga’s as strong as a hundred men, and she gets her strength from her braids. So even if you cut her head off, she can still walk around on her braids, like a spider.”

  Anya frowned. “That’s disgusting.”

  “And she drinks blood, and eats children,” Ivan continued. “She doesn’t live in a normal house. She pulled the legs off a chicken and put them on her house, so it can stand up and walk around. If a bogatyr finds her house, she can just tell it to run away, and it will!”

  Anya finished braiding the challah, tucking the ends under and arranging them longer than she normally would. The idea of a blood-drinking, spider-braid-legged witch’s head walking around was making her stomach flop. “Well, your papa is practically a bogatyr, right? So no witch would come here.”

  Ivan brought his hands up, fingers curled like claws. “No! She loves to destroy bogatyri! She once enslaved a bogatyr who came to defeat her, and put his soul in a heartwood box she keeps over her hearth! And to make sure he wouldn’t ever try to kill her, she cut off his hands!”

  Ivan wiggled his fingers, and Anya pushed his shoulder. “She did not! That’s disgusting!”

  With a laugh, Ivan set his elbows on the counter and balanced his chin in his hands. “Do you know any stories about witches?”

  “Not witches,” Anya said. “But my babulya told me stories about spirits that possess people. There’s one, an ibbur. The ibbur will get inside someone’s body and help them do a difficult task.”

  Ivan huffed. “I give you a witch with hair like spider legs, and you give me a kindly spirit that helps you do hard things?”

  Anya scrunched her mouth. “Babulya also told me about an evil possessing spirit! She called it ru’ach tezazit. It’s a bad spirit that gets inside someone and makes them say or do things they would never do.” She hesitated, wanting to make the story more frightening. “It could make you kill someone, and you couldn’t do anything to stop it!”