The Fierce Reads Anthology (8 page)

All through dinner, she waited for Magda to open the oven, but when the meal was finished, the old woman set a piece of yesterday’s lemon cake before her. Nadya shrugged. As she reached for the cream, she heard a soft sound, a gurgle. She looked at Vladchek, but the bear was fast asleep, snoring softly.

And then she heard it again, a gurgle followed by a plaintive coo. From inside the oven.

Nadya pushed back from the table, nearly knocking her chair over, and stared at Magda, horrified, but the witch did not flinch.

A knock sounded at the door.

“Go into the larder, Nadya.”

For a moment, Nadya hovered between the table and the door. Then she backed away, pausing only to grab hold of Vladchek’s collar and drag him with her onto the top shelf of the larder, comforted by his drowsy snuffling and the warm feel of his fur beneath her hands.

Magda opened the door. The wax-faced woman stood waiting at the threshold, almost as if she were afraid to move. Magda wrapped her hands in towels and pulled open the oven’s iron doors. A squalling cry filled the room. The woman grabbed at the doorposts as her knees buckled, then pressed her hands to her mouth, her chest heaving, tears streaming over her sallow cheeks. Magda swaddled the gingerbaby in a red kerchief and handed it, squirming and mewling, into the woman’s trembling, outstretched arms. “
Milaya
,” the woman crooned.
Sweet girl.
She turned her back on Magda and disappeared into the night, not bothering to close the door behind her.

The next day, Nadya left her breakfast untouched, placing her cold bowl of porridge on the floor for Vladchek. He turned up his nose at it until Magda put it back on the stove to warm.

Before Magda could ask her question, Nadya said, “That wasn't a real child. Why did she take it?”

“It was real enough.”

“What will happen to it? What will happen to her?” Nadya asked, a wild edge to her voice.

“Eventually it will be nothing but crumbs,” said Magda.

“And then what? Will you just make her another?”

“The mother will be dead long before that. She has the same fever that took her infant.”

“Then cure her!” Nadya shouted, smacking the table with her unused spoon.

“She didn't ask to be cured. She asked for a child.”

Nadya put on her mittens and stomped out into the yard. She did not go inside for lunch. She meant to skip dinner too, to show what she thought of Magda and her terrible magic. But by the time night came her stomach was growling, and when Magda put down a plate of sliced duck with hunter’s sauce, Nadya picked up her fork and knife.

“I want to go home,” she muttered to her plate.

“So go,” said Magda.

Winter dragged on with frost and cold, but the lamps always burned golden in the little hut. Nadya’s cheeks grew rosy and her clothes grew snug. She learned how to mix up Magda’s tonics without looking at the recipes and how to bake an almond cake in the shape of a crown. She learned which herbs were valuable and which were dangerous, and which herbs were valuable because they were dangerous.

Nadya knew there was much that Magda didn’t teach her. She told herself she was glad of it, that she wanted nothing to do with Magda’s abominations. But sometimes she felt her curiosity clawing at her like a different kind of hunger.

And then, one morning, she woke to the tapping of the blind crow’s beak on the sill and the drip, drip, drip of melted snow from the eaves. Bright sun shone through the windows. The thaw had come.

That morning, Magda laid out sweet rolls with prune jam, a plate of boiled eggs, and bitter greens. Nadya ate and ate, afraid to reach the end of her meal, but eventually she could not take another bite.

“What is it you want?” asked Magda.

This time Nadya hesitated, afraid. “If I go, couldn't I just—”

“You cannot come and go from this place like you’re fetching water from a well. I will not have you bring a monster to my door.” Nadya shivered.
A monster.
So she’d been right about Karina.

“What is it you want?” asked Magda again.

Nadya thought of Genetchka dancing, of nervous Lara, of Betya and Ludmilla, of the others she had never known.

“I want my father to be free of Karina. I want Duva to be free. I want to go home.”

Gently, Magda reached out and touched Nadya's left hand—first the ring finger, then the pinkie.

“Think on it,” she said.

The next morning when Magda went to lay out the breakfast, she found the cleaver Nadya had placed there.

For two days, the cleaver lay untouched on the table, as they measured and sifted and mixed, making batch after batch of batter. On the second afternoon, when the hardest of the work was done, Magda turned to Nadya.

“You know that you are welcome to remain here with me,” said the witch.

Nadya stretched out her hand.

Magda sighed. The cleaver flashed once in the afternoon sun, the edge gleaming the dull gray of Grisha steel, then fell with a sound like a gunshot.

At the sight of her fingers lying forlorn on the table, Nadya fainted.

Magda healed the stumps of Nadya’s fingers, bound her hand, let her rest. And while she slept, Magda took the two fingers and ground them down to a wet red meal that she mixed into the batter.

When Nadya revived, they worked side by side, shaping the gingergirl on a damp plank near as big as a door, then shoved her into the blazing oven.

All night the gingergirl baked, filling the hut with a marvelous smell. Nadya knew she was smelling her own bones and blood, but still her mouth watered. She dozed. Near dawn, the oven doors creaked open and the gingergirl crawled out. She crossed the room, opened the window, and lay down on the counter to let herself cool.

In the morning, Nadya and Magda attended the gingergirl, dusted her with sugar, gave her frosted lips and thick ropes of icing for hair.

They dressed her in Nadya’s clothes and boots, and set her on the path toward Duva.

Then Magda sat Nadya down at the table and took a small jar from one of the cabinets. She opened the window and the eyeless black crow came to rest on the table, picking at the crumbs the gingergirl had left behind.

Magda tipped the contents of the jar into her palm and held them out to Nadya. “Open your mouth,” she said.

In Magda’s hand, in a pool of shiny fluid, lay a pair of bright blue eyes. Hatchling’s eyes.

“Do not swallow,” said Magda sternly, “and do not retch.”

Nadya closed her eyes and forced her lips to part. She tried not to gag as the crow’s eyes slid onto her tongue.

“Open your eyes,” commanded Magda.

Nadya obeyed, and when she did, the whole room had shifted. She saw herself sitting in a chair, eyes still closed, Magda beside her. She tried to raise her hands, but found that her wings rose instead. She hopped on her little crow feet and released a startled squawk of surprise.

Magda shooed her to the window and Nadya, elated from the feeling of her wings and the wind spreading beneath them, did not see the sadness in the old woman’s gaze.

Nadya rose high into the air in a great wheeling arc, dipping her wings, learning the feel of them. She saw the woods spread beneath her, the clearing, and Magda’s hut. She saw the Petrazoi in the distance and, gliding lower, she saw the gingergirl’s path through the woods. She swooped and darted between the trees, unafraid of the forest for the first time since she could remember.

She circled over Duva, saw the main street, the cemetery, two new altars laid out. Two more girls gone during the long winter while she grew fat at the witch’s table. They would be the last. She screeched and dove beside the gingergirl, driving her onward, her soldier, her champion.

Nadya watched from a clothesline as the gingergirl crossed the clearing to her father’s house. Inside, she could hear raised voices arguing. Did he know what Karina had done? Had he begun to suspect what she truly was?

The gingergirl knocked and the voices quieted. When the door swung open, her father squinted into the dusk. Nadya was shocked at the toll the winter had taken on him. His broad shoulders looked hunched and narrow, and, even from a distance, she could see the way the skin hung loose on his frame. She waited for him to cry out in horror at the monster that stood before him.

“Nadya?” Maxim gasped. “Nadya!” He pulled the gingergirl into his arms with a rough cry.

Karina appeared behind him in the door, face pale, eyes wide. Nadya felt a twinge of disappointment. Somehow she’d imagined that Karina would take one look at the gingergirl and crumble to dust, or that the sight of Nadya alive and well on her doorstep would force her to blurt out some ugly confession.

Maxim drew the gingergirl inside and Nadya fluttered down to the windowsill to peer through the glass.

The house looked more cramped and gray than ever after the warmth of Magda’s hut. She saw that the collection of wooden dolls on the mantel had grown.

Nadya’s father caressed the gingergirl’s burnished brown arm, peppering her with questions, but the gingergirl stayed silent, huddling by the fire. Nadya wasn't even sure that she
could
speak.

But Maxim did not seem to notice her silence. He babbled on, laughing, crying, shaking his head in wonder. Karina hovered behind him, watching as she always had. There was fear in her eyes, but something else, too, something troubling that looked almost like gratitude.

Then Karina stepped forward, touched the gingergirl’s soft cheek, her frosted hair. Nadya waited, sure Karina would be singed, that she would let out a shriek as the flesh of her hand peeled away like bark, revealing not bones but branches and the monstrous form of the
khitka
beneath her pretty skin.

Instead, Karina bowed her head and murmured what might have been a prayer. She took her coat from the hook.

“I am going to Baba Olya's.”

“Yes, yes,” Maxim said distractedly, unable to pull his gaze from his daughter.

She’s running away
, Nadya realized in horror. And the gingergirl was making no move to stop her.

Karina wrapped her head in a scarf, pulled on her gloves, and slipped out the door, shutting it behind her without a backward glance.

Nadya hopped and squawked from the window ledge.

I will follow her
, she thought.
I will peck out her eyes.

Karina bent down, picked up a pebble from the path, and hurled it at Nadya.

Nadya released an indignant caw.

But when Karina spoke, her voice was gentle. “Fly away now, little bird,” she said. “Some things are better left unseen.” Then she disappeared into the dusk.

Nadya fluttered her wings, unsure of what to do. She peered back through the window.

Her father had pulled the gingergirl into his lap and was stroking her white hair.

“Nadya,” he said again and again. “Nadya.” He nuzzled the brown flesh of her shoulder, pressed his lips to her skin.

Outside, Nadya’s small heart beat against her hollow bones.

“Forgive me,” Maxim murmured, the tears on his cheeks dissolving the soft curve of icing at her neck.

Nadya shivered. Her wings stuttered a futile, desperate tattoo on the glass. But her father’s hand slipped beneath the hem of her skirts, and the gingergirl did not move.

It isn't me
, Nadya told herself.
Not really. It isn't me.

She thought of her father’s restlessness, of his lost horses, his treasured sledge. Before that…before that, girls had gone missing from other towns, one here, one there. Stories, rumors, faraway crimes. But then the famine had come, the long winter, and Maxim had been trapped.

“I've tried to stop,” he said as he pulled his daughter close. “Believe me,” he begged. “Say you believe me.”

The gingergirl stayed silent.

Maxim opened his wet mouth to kiss her again and the sound he made was something between a groan and a sigh as his teeth sank into the sweetness of her shoulder.

The sigh turned to a sob as he bit down.

Nadya watched her father consume the gingergirl, bite by bite, limb by limb. He wept as he ate, but he did not stop, and by the time he was finished, the fire was cold in the grate. When he was done, he lay stretched out on the floor, his belly distended, his fingers sticky, his beard crusted with crumbs. Only then did the crow turn away.

They found Nadya’s father there the next morning, his insides ruptured and stinking of rot. He had spent the night on his knees, vomiting blood and sugar. Karina had not been home to help him. When they took up the bloodstained floorboards, they found a stash of objects, among them, a child’s prayer book, a bracelet of glass beads, the rest of the vivid red ribbons Genetchka had worn in her hair the night of the dance, and Lara Deniken’s white apron, embroidered with her clumsy stitches, the strings stained with blood. From the mantel, the little wooden dolls looked on.

Nadya flew back to the witch’s hut, returned to her body by Magda’s soft words and Vladchek licking her limp hand. She spent long days in silence, working beside Magda, only picking at her food.

It was not her father she thought of, but Karina. Karina who had found ways to visit when Nadya’s mother took ill, who had filled the rooms when Havel left, keeping Nadya close. Karina who had driven Nadya into the woods, so that there would be nothing left for her father to use but a ghost. Karina who had given herself to a monster, in the hope of saving just one girl.

Nadya scrubbed and cooked and cleared the garden, and thought of Karina alone with Maxim over the long winter, fearing his absence, longing for it, searching the house for some way to prove her suspicions, her fingers scrabbling over floors and cabinets, feeling for the secret seams hidden by the carpenter’s clever hands.

In Duva, there was talk of burning Maxim Grushov’s body, but in the end they buried him without Saints’ prayers, in rocky soil where to this day nothing grows. The lost girls’ bodies were never found, though occasionally a hunter will come across a stash of bones in the wood, a shell comb, or a shoe.